White Block  Art House:
SsD wins competition for prestigious Korean art gallery

The new gallery for SangSang will be a 1500 m² exhibition and cultural space at the heart of the Heyri Art Valley in South Korea.  SsD’s winning scheme is a matrix of carefully proportioned gallery boxes and interstitial cultural and landscape spaces.  A silkscreen glass skin modulates views and light while subtely expressing the volumes within.

Jinhee Park, principal of SsD:
We carefully considered the spatial and environmental needs of today’s art.  Integration with the natural landscape of the lake-front site was also of crucial importance.  The result places the intense and controlled experience of art side-by-side with informal social and landscape interactions. The circulation through the building integrates a wide variety of exhibition spaces into a single experience.

John Hong, principal of SsD:
We’re excited to integrate a high level of sustainability into a program and site that is challenging, but in the end a great match. We parametrically studied natural lighting to optimize for viewing artwork as well for lowering energy consumption.  We’ve also proposed passive ventilation systems that will integrate with environmental control of the more archival spaces.
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Experiencing Art:    Beginning at the entrance of the building, visitors are invited to spiral through a series of ‘boxes’ before emerging at the planted sculpture garden on the roof.  Spaces vary greatly in size, ranging from 11m to 3m tall to accommodate a wide variety of works.  Exposure to natural light is also closely controlled: While some spaces receive a maximum of diffuse northern sunlight, other more intimate spaces are lit by light-wells, and video-art galleries are provided with an absence of natural light all-together.  Extraneous circulation space is kept to a minimum by connecting galleries directly to each other, or through large active social spaces.

Unfolded section through varying gallery spaces.

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excerpt from the AIA press release:

Jinhee Park and the firm she co-founded—Single Speed Design—are widely published, including being awarded the first Metropolis Next Generation Prize. “Park is among those few uncommon young architects whose contributions and skills will shape our profession for decades to come,” writes Diane Georgopulos, FAIA, on behalf of the Boston Society of Architects nomination.  The firm’s Big Dig House (2006), in Massachusetts, drew particular acclaim from Susan S. Szenasy, Metropolis editor in chief. “Their project, recycling the remnants of Boston’s Big Dig into beautiful housing, so impressed the judges that the proposal, happily, came to represent the high standards we have since then put on our awards program,” Szenasy writes.

see also: Metropolis POV