Gwanggyo Power Center by MVRDV, Seoul Korea

A self-sufficient city center for 77,000 inhabitants ready by 2011. A reality in the making with Dutch architects MVRDV winning the competition to design a city center for Gwanggyo, 35 km south of Seoul, Korea. The design has several overgrown hill shaped buildings with great programmatic diversity that will take on high urban density with possibilities of further developments around the “Power City.” This is keeping with the millennium trend seen in Korea where local nodes with a high density concentration of mixed program are used in Korean town planning. The Gwanggyo Power Centre will consist of 200,000m2 housing, 48,000m2offices, 200,000m2mix of culture, retail, leisure and education and 200,000m2 parking.

All in one

The layout is catering for housing, offices, culture centers, retail spaces, leisure facilities and education areas. The unique ring elements are pushed outwards so that each part receives a terrace for outdoor life. Open spaces are further added in the form of atria within each tower to get lobbies for housing and offices, plazas for shopping area and halls for the museum and leisure areas. The atria are formed by the shifting of floors and cater for light, ventilation and semi-private spaces.

Green dream

Supporting the environment will be box hedges planted on the terraces and roofs of the buildings. These will contribute to improved ventilation, energy and water use reduction. With a floor to floor circulation in place the plants will be watered with the stored water. These vertical parks will line the horizon as overgrown hills. Adding to the ‘park’ environment would be a surrounding lake and forested hills blending into the whole picture.

The whole project with its striated topology and its awesome scale would be an achievement of a whole other level. A consortium led by Daewoo develops the project with local firm DA Group, which commissioned MVRDV to design the scheme. British firm Arup is involved as engineer. Currently, the design is with the Gyeonggi provincial authority’s Urban Innovation Corporation for further development and feasibility thought.