Heyri G39-2

House, Jazz Hall and PoDjaGi Gallery, Heyri Art Valley, South Korea 2004

Florian Beigel + ARU London, Kim JongKyu + MARU Seoul

The heyri art valley project

This is an unusually rare opportunity to test the approach to urban design that we call landscape infrastructure design - designing the rug and not the picnic. Kim JongKyu, is responsible for the design guidelines for this new living and working village for a co-operative of people in the arts including film makers, book publishers, painters, poets etc. Topography is the main source in the formation of the urban design. In Kim's design, a number of 'patches' are laid out, adjusting themselves to the contours of the hills and valleys. These patches are shared by a number of private building plots, crossed by footpaths and roads.

The heyri topographical infrastructure

ARU made a proposal for the detail formation of one patch, the topography that will be shared by 9 podium type houses along the slope of a hill on the Heyri site. One of these houses is the G39-2 house. The Design Guide sets out the principle section and orientation of this type of building. Using this as a starting point, ARU designed three groupings of land terraces, stepping down the slope of the hill to the north, and to the west, (see model photo).

The jazz hall

The gentle slope of the street in front of the building continues inside the building as an entrance ramp down into the jazz hall. At the bottom of this ramp the floor of the hall continues sloping downwards in the opposite direction. The surfaces of the walls and ceiling of the room are covered with a silver foil-covered material. In this way the size and shape of the jazz hall will be ephemeral and changing according to the way it is lit and the mood of the music.

Plywood and polycarbonate pavilions

The material strategy for this building follows the concept of a pair of translucent tents with plywood inner houses each built on its own land terrace. We are attracted by the wonder and mystery of the wooden boxes shimmering through the 'ice'. The north wall of the gallery pavilion is light diffusing, a veil that becomes a PoDjaGi at the scale of the building.

A house of good rooms

The house is a collection of good rooms, each with a different character and ambience, connected to each other, without corridors. Variations in the character of the rooms are derived by specific architectural treatment of each room such as size, proportion, tectonic and material variation, and by proximity to other spaces. Such a house is adaptable. It can accommodate changes of use quite easily. This is not so much the case with a house that has been designed as bedrooms, living rooms, bathrooms etc. connected by corridors.