Chung-Nam Government Complex Successfully Blurs the Lines

The design of a new Government Complex of Chung-Nam Province - one of the nine South Korean provinces – re-imagines the idea, image and functions of an institutional building and government center. 

The design reconciles two opposing concepts: 1. BUILDING vs. NATURE and 2. GOVERNMENT vs. CIVIC.  By blurring the differences between the built environment and the landscape, people are invited inside and encouraged to inhabit spaces atop and around the structures. This overall design creates a new civic park for the province. 

The complex, designed by H Associates and Haeahn Architecture, has recently been selected as a 2010 AIA New York Design Award winning project. Praised by jurors for successfully overcoming “traditional hierarchies that often govern these kind of projects”, the design solution received a Merit Award in the Un-built Work category of the awards program. One of the jury members, Karen Van Lengen, FAIA, also noted that “The jury admired the planning and design direction of the project that suggested a new set of relationships between the government and the people, and between building and site.”

Here’s a project description we received from H Associates:

BUILDING vs. NATURE - The building form is continuous and horizontal, reflecting the forms of the adjacent mountain landscape.  A sinuous green roof connects several buildings and provides a unified outdoor space to accommodate a variety of programs and people.  The existing topography of the site and the green axes inform the organic shapes of the buildings, and provide cues that create view corridors extending to the natural scenery surrounding the site. 

GOVERNMENT vs. CIVIC - The government and civic spaces are designed to coexist in the same complex, and the building envelope modulates the degree of connectivity between these two systems.  The façade is composed of a continuous layer of metal with variably sized perforations.  The size of the perforations is directly related to the degree of privacy needed by the program within each space.  The result is an additional level of richness in the design and a greater degree of continuity in the complex.