The Seoul Metropolitan Government sought to construct the city's first covered landscape park decking over a highway through a two-phase international design competition. The competition brief called for a paradigmatic infrastructural public works project that would link nature and city, reconnect Seoul's urban fabric back to the Han River over the major Olympic-daero expressway, and introduce new cultural spaces that integrate an existing historical building with newly planned adjacent apartment complexes. 10,000 square-meters of the Olympic-daero highway will be decked over and transformed into a landscaped ecological environment featuring gardens, forest playgrounds, paths, and trails enabling the public to walk from New Banpo to Banpo Hangang District and the river's recreational waterfront parks. To realize this vision, the project will be funded as a public-private partnership involving the housing association development of the neighboring Banpo Jugong and Acro River Apartment complexes. Our proposal Fastscape-Slowscape was selected out of 82 entries to advance to the second phase of the competition. Developed further in the second phase as one of six shortlisted finalists, the project was presented in a public jury review session in June 2024 at Seoul Metropolitan City Hall.
Fastcape-Slowscape draws upon Seoul’s contrasting narratives of urbanization – one grounded in the strictures and linearity of the urban grid, the other in the meandering morphology of its diverse ecological terrains. The project juxtaposes the rich, contrasting physical and social narratives embedded in these two landscapes and reconnects a city back to the water, redefining its relationship to its fluvial edge from one of infrastructural speed to one of contemplative pause and recreation.
COMPETITION PHASE 1 CORE TEAM:
MMK+, Strange Works Studio, Emergent Studio, Terrain Work
COMPETITION PHASE 2 TEAM + CONSULTANTS:
Architecture & Urban Design: MMK+, Strange Works Studio, Emergent Studio
Landscape: Terrain Work, CA Landscape Design
Structure: SEN Engineering Group
Civil: Yooshin Engineering
Sustainable Design: Ellie Jungmin Han
Lighting: Eonsld
Visualization: YA Studio
Our strategy for the project weaves two contrasting experiences across the Olympic-daero highway, maximizing its experience for two different publics. Visitors and tourists are drawn quickly through the primary corridor of the Fastscape, which extends the urban corridor of SinBanpo-ro directly to the Hangang river waterfront and its recreational edge. Meanwhile, residents of the new housing association development meander back and forth through the diverse ecologies and landscaped placemaking of the Slowscape. Both publics are activated by the new cultural building at the junction between fast and slow, a node that preserves the memory of the old historic 108 building by encasing its floor plan and facades in a glass atrium. The Fastscape frames a dramatic vista of the Han River and Seoul’s urban skyline beyond, while the Slowscape emphasizes more organic and immersive activities characterized by a thickened topographic ground, diverse ecologies, and meandering pathways – contrasting experiences offering both fast and slow rhythms of urban life.
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The project is a place to view and be viewed. This experience is particularly exhibited in the proposal's Fastscape, which offers a powerful iconic form as viewed from the Han River waterfront as it negotiates the sectional challenges of the site and features panoramic views as one traverses it. The Fastscape promenade is direct and singular in function, extending the existing urban corridor of Banpo directly to the waterfront in a direct efficient circulation route and drawing park-goers and tourists through this primary connective corridor. It employs a forced perspective strategy as a framing mechanism, tapering in form to reduce the perception of distance, making the panoramic waterfront view feel closer and encouraging movement. Formed by slick, linear extensions of steel and wood, the Fastscape ends in a cantilevered viewing platform that elevates the public vertically, creating a moment of sectional stacking over an amphitheater performance area that also becomes a significant visual element on the waterfront, drawing in visitors.
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In contrast to the Fastscape, the project's Slowscape weaves a secondary meandering circulatory route back and forth across the Fastscape promenade, forming the more intimate placemaking experience of the project. The Slowscape weave creates a more diverse, multifunctional experience, synergistic of the site's complexities. It assumes a more minimal profile above the Olympic-daero expressway, strategically preserving views from the adjacent housing development.
The Slowscape is a diverse reconstructed topography marked by diverse ecological conditions ranging from open meadows, denser forested areas, to various recreational uses that organize static and dynamic zones through a scalar hierarchy of space. It is composed of a thickened layered ground condition of deep vegetative mounds, thick and heavy, gritty and textural, layered with biodiverse planting types, and embedded with topography. Along this meandering landscape deck, the Slowscape park is activated at points with recreational park programming that break up the scale of the space with cultural activities and placemaking nodes.
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The Slowscape and Fastscape concept is central to the project's structural and material choices. Angular steel framing reinforce the transience, lightness, and airiness experience of the Fastscape promenade. Use and application of linear pier-like wood decking encourages movement and features unobstructed, elevated views of the highway, the river, and Seoul's skyline beyond. In contrast to the Fastscape, prefabricated concrete structural elements deployed in the Slowscape evoke the heaviness of the earth. Its form is sinuous and complex, holding landscape as a timeless connector between diverse elements of habitation.
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Situated at the overlap point between slow vs. fast, horizontal vs. vertical, interior vs. exterior, the new cultural building activates the proposal’s deck-park with flexible programming while also preserving the memory of the historic 108 housing building by encasing its floor plan and facades in a glass atrium. The existing edifice of the 108 building is treated as a volume, a conceptual inversion—what was previously solid is now void, what was an object in the landscape is now a subtracted atrium—bringing light and views deep into the cultural building’s section. The inverted atrium is embedded in the meadow of the deck-park's landscape above as a curious glass box, becoming a void filled with light and a celebrated object at the center of the new cultural center. It also forms an upper level entry that introduces park-goers to a dramatic view of its original 1:1-scale housing floor plan as they peer down below from the rooftop meadow. The 108 building’s facades are preserved and adaptively reused to become a flexible educational space that is treated as a filter between community and exhibition programmatic zones. The original floor plan of the 108 building is inscribed on new floor plates which are situated in the section to create two main voids, useful for lectures or large events, and smaller spaces for lounges or other more intimate programs.
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