GOYANG GOVERNMENT CENTRE

Client: Goyang City Hall (New City Hall Construction Department)

Place: Goyang, Seoul, South Korea

Date: 2021 Competition

Type: Civic

Area: 73,946.62m2

Budget: 201,327 million KRW

AZPML

Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Maider Llaguno-Munitxa, Ivaylo Nachev, Miguel Bello, Eleonora D’Agostino

Yo2 Architects

Young Joon Kim, Choi Jeong-Woo

Our proposal for the new Goyang Government Complex is aimed to provide a building which will offer maximum connectivity and integration between different bodies in the organization, maximum efficiency in terms of environmental and ecological performance, maximum flexibility to adjust to future needs and changes, and an iconography that explains the organization and its communal civic values.

Our proposal is divided into two buildings, the City Hall and the City Council, facing each other as a distinct representation of the administrative structure of the Goyang Borough.

The landscape is conceived as a vegetated public space with a dense tree canopy and abundant groundcovers. Vegetation and water-retention will optimize the complex’ microclimate by shading the ground, collecting stormwater and evapotranspirating. Hard paving will be reduced to a minimum, to maintain the natural hygrometry of the site.  Along the Daejangcheon Creek we propose to use the pre-existing ground water to create a marshland landscape where gentle undulations of the ground will provide retention pools for stormwater retention. The landscape will be formed by biofiltering vegetation which will purify the stormwater in the site and return it to the aquifer.

All programs are interlinked by a cruciform three-dimensional atrium which provides an environmentally conditioned public space which can be used in all seasons as a location for diverse municipal events. The atrium will open to the four cardinal points through 18m-tall, monumental gates, which will make the complex permeable, visually and physically from all directions, seamlessly connecting the monumental public atrium to the surrounding landscape.

A central atrium will bring light and ventilation to all the informal meeting areas located on the floor levels. The atrium will play a fundamental role in integrating the community, but also will provide natural ventilation to the public spaces. Using the height of the atrium as a natural ventilation engine, the air will be naturally extracted through buoyancy, reducing the need for mechanical ventilation in the offices. In the winter, the atrium will be heated by the greenhouse hot air, providing thermal buffering and recirculation, while in the summer it will act as a ventilation shaft, combined with sprinklers on the irrigation system for the planters located around the atrium, to provide adiabatic cooling.

The different components of the program have been piled to demonstrates physically the relationships between the different parts of the program The building is assembled as a piling of the four program zones in the complex, where the municipal administration is proposed as a ring of office space around a central atrium.