Samho Building
A block of the Paju Book City, the site is defined by four different edges: public green space on the north, major thoroughfare on the east, pedestrian and vehicle shared street on the south, pedestrian oriented shopping mall on the west. Housing the publisher Samho, the building has a four-fold program: offices, bookstore, concert hall plus gallery, and apartments for the owner and possibly a few others in the company. The analysis of these two sets of given conditions generates an architecture design of four components or four relatively independent two-story micro-structures: On the ground level, bookstore / Commercial Building on the west aligned with other retails, concert hall-gallery / Cultural Building on the east with an enclosed elevation toward the traffic lanes; stacked on the upper level and turned 90 degrees, Office Building on the street front south while Residential Building on the more private north side facing the landscape. The rotation of the upper buildings offers southern exposure to the offices and apartments and, together with two buildings bellow, forms an open center space, which brings urbanity inside the complex. Each micro-building is further distinguished by a distinct sectional organization and with the natural material that makes up the inner content of the “sandwich” glass curtain wall: earth, reed, cotton, and wood shavings for Cultural, Commercial, Residential and Office respectively.
CREDITS
Architect: Atelier Feichang Jianzhu
Project designer: Yung Ho Chang
Project team: Lucas Gallardo, Shang Li, Liu Xianghui, Ju Du
Consultants: Xu Minsheng (structural consultant)
Associate architect:: Iroje Architects & Planners, Seoul, Korea
Client: SAM HO Media Publishing Co. Ltd
Structure and material: Steel frame structure, glass walls with cobble stones, earth, wood shavings, or reeds as infill
Building area: 2895 sq. meters
