SUNCHEON CITY HALL

New York-based H Architecture with Haeahn Architecture, Seoul, presents a competition winning entry for Suncheon New City Hall in South Korea. The project aims to establish a new typology of city hall building and program, and to represent the city as an ecological capital. The goal of the design proposal was to maintain the sustainable development of Suncheon City, create open publicness to the citizens, revitalize the old downtown, and construct the new City Hall with innovative workspaces.

Suncheon is a garden city represented by the National Garden and Suncheon Bay, and the new City Hall will be located in the old downtown. First, the project proposes a garden of emptiness in Suncheon, full of wisdom and unique cultural assets that have created a place with nature. It is a garden that spreads toward Bonghwa Mountain, Namsan Mountain, Okcheon, and Dongcheon with the original urban area in the background. The concave morphological language plays a role in visually expanding the open space of the site into the surrounding scenery, and on the streetscape level. The project proposes Suncheon City Hall as a garden of filling, where citizen participation will be the center. The traces of the existing government office and the spaces of the new government office are refilled here with various forms and levels of courtyard and functional spaces. The Garden of filling is the third place where various administrative and civic activities are triggered and overlapped, and have vitality.

The diverse and versatile outdoor spaces are variously inserted into the civic spaces, government buildings, and councils, and the overlapping spaces loosen the boundaries of each space through three-dimensional expansion, and reinforce the linkage between functions. The interconnected indoor and outdoor civic spaces accommodate various type of activities required by different functions. The concave shape of the building serves as a device that contains the three mountains and two waters of Suncheon, and as a device for environmental optimization of the office space and outdoor space of the city hall. In addition, the active internal and external connections create a new type of government office as city hall for citizen office building and provides a new garden in Suncheon at the same time.