Detail of the project ed. 2024

man­ri­hyun-church / South Korea

Design­er	Dongkyu Choi
Loca­tion	Seoul
Nation	South Korea
Design Team
Year	2018
Pho­to credits	Kim Jae-Kyeong, Soook Chai

Pho­to external

Project descrip­tion

Man­ri­hyun Church com­bines a new addi­tion­al build­ing with the exist­ing old chapel. The church is locat­ed in the old town of Seoul, where dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed res­i­den­tial build­ings are inter­wo­ven with wind­ing urban streets. The site has an elon­gat­ed shape, and its hill­side loca­tion cre­ates inter­est­ing con­trasts with the sur­round­ing nar­row paths.
His­tor­i­cal­ly, the cas­tle wall of Seoul, which demar­cat­ed the city’s bound­ary, usu­al­ly exist­ed along the ridge of the hill. Sim­i­lar­ly, the church is sit­u­at­ed at the bor­der­line of two dis­tricts. The lon­gi­tu­di­nal and cur­va­ceous wall facade not only demar­cates the inside and out­side of the build­ing but also evokes the mem­o­ry of the exist­ing site.
By remod­el­ing the exist­ing church and adding nec­es­sary spaces to the new­ly acquired site, the build­ing appears new­ly con­struct­ed. The wall sur­face sym­bol­izes the pages of a scroll Bible, with the pat­tern of open­ings rep­re­sent­ing the scrip­tures. The low­er part of the build­ing is made of glass cur­tain walls, cre­at­ing a visu­al con­nec­tion with the sur­round­ing neighborhood.
The vari­a­tion in height of the sur­round­ing site allows access to the build­ing from sev­er­al dif­fer­ent street lev­els. This cre­ates a dynam­ic inter­ac­tion of spaces on dif­fer­ent lev­els, both inside and out­side, in the grand lob­by area.

Explana­to­ry report of the project
Down­load report

Pho­to internal

Tech­ni­cal drawings

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