Hagye Apartment Complex

Hagye Apartment Complex

Client: Seoul Housing and Communities Corporation

Place: Hagye-dong, Seoul, South Korea

Date: 2021 Competition

Type: Residential

Area: 113860m2

Budget: 240,004,406,000 KRW

AZPML

Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Maider Llaguno-Munitxa, Ivaylo Nachev, Miguel Bello

Our proposal for the Hagye Apartment Complex in Seoul aims to develop a residential prototype which will be able to redefine the models of existing residential estates in Seoul in the age of global warming and ecological degradation. We propose a prototype which merges an urban park with high-rise residential as a model to design a comfortable and healthy urban microclimate. The built mass has been evenly distributed around the park to optimize air renewal, self-shading and views. The rounded geometry of the towers will diminish the resistance of the mass to airflow.

The towers are formed by wrapping a standard residential layout around the vertical circulation core, which remains open to the outside, allowing daylight and ventilation into the distribution galleries, and facilitating fire-escape conditions. The characteristic V-shape of the towers, which range between 21 and 35 floors will ensure that all units will enjoy SE or SW exposure.

The towers will contribute to improve the air quality by using the height of the buildings to host purifying towers extracting the air on ground level and filtering the air. The air chimneys will be built as lightweight transparent ETFE tubes, attached to the vertical circulation core, and connected to an ETFE solar roof at the base of the towers.

The facades of the towers will be provided with generous terraces and generous outdoor spaces to all residential units. These terraces will shade the facades to reduce solar loads and dissipate heat.

Every tower will have a rooftop greenhouse working in conjunction with the ventilation chimney, as a further step to oxygenate the environment. Furthermore, the rooftop greenhouses will allow for residents to grow vegetables, and exercise, or as a playground for children.