The Design Brief asked for:
"A new prototype of cultural facility called 'Museumpark' should be proposed as a park with a cluster of museum, art museum, and modern and industrial heritages, which will play as the center of culture and art..."
For us, the site was at the culmination of two urban axes: a) green ribbons that originates from a large district park in the South West and flow through the residential district and b) cultural and commercial corridors in the West and South West that promised to become important socio-cultural spaces for the entire city. The Museum-park’s role was pivotal in this important function of weaving and knotting the urban fabric into distinct and identifiable nodes, granting Incheon a distinct image of a world-class city.
The museum was thought of not so much as a built mass that occupied and commanded space but more like a ‘frame’ that valorised the history and open space of a key position in the city. The decision to retain the OCI Factory and the Houses of the Missionary as they stand reflected not just a value for tradition but also a cultural attitude towards reuse of built spaces as an imperative for a sustainable future.
We started with the aspiration of continuing the garden through the built-form. The iconic form of a ramp weaved through the existing buildings to fold in on itself. This, while countering the establishment of a beginning and an end, became a Möbius plane where the garden outside and the exhibits inside seamlessly slide into the another in a constant dance of movement. Facing the city on the western front, this interweaving form then creates a portal that is an invitation to the world outside. While doing so it frames the existing OCI building and bridges over the a few of the ‘Houses of Missionary’ buildings. An iconic form images that at once captures the essence of the Möbius plane as well as the Frame into one stable structural unit.
The iconic form of the building is achieved through an infrastructural approach utilising a trussed load-bearing façade. The Steel Frames connected to each other through steel floors form a self-supporting structure. The east portion of the structure appears to hang from two vertically-inclined forms that are anchored to the ground. In reality, the structure’s centre of gravity makes the form stable even without major anchoring into the substructure.
- Project Team: Aditya Sreedharan, Ashish Pandey, Ayush Pal, Jezlan Ahmed, Manisha Kumaran, Owais Asif, Sanchari Majumdar, Sonali Patle, Sumit Ghosh
- Associates: Ahn Hyung Uk, Atelier Cho-ga
- Year and Location: Dong-gu, Incheon.
- Keywords: Cultural, Design Competition