The Zooraji Rooftop Garden in Daegu, South Korea, is the third in a series of roofscapes that Design Principal Alan Maskin has created in the country. Zooraji explores aspects of scale and storytelling through an interactive set of outdoor experiences. Located on the 9th floor of a shopping and transit center, the rooftop park is an urban oasis with unusual and engaging spaces for visitors to explore.
“In my work, story informs design, and sometimes a built project is later turned into a story. Fiction to non-fiction and back again.” –Alan Maskin, Design Principal
A small town near Nakdong River is a place where the client spent his youth. He wanted to come back to his hometown and spend rest of his life in his new house. The site was the deepest place in town and a good place to overlook the town. There was a limitation of using site due to the planned future road on the back of bamboo woods. To maximize green space, we placed the house following the shape of the boundary on the town side. The overall form of the house is ascending from the entrance to the upper floor like a ridge.
Creating identity on an urban and a human scale Following its implementation as a result of the rapid urbanisation of the booming middle class in South Korea, apartment living continues to be the most popular type of housing in the country. In cities across South Korea this type of housing can be found stacked in identical, densely packed, utilitarian blocks.
In ancient Greece, the Gymnasium was used to practice exercise, as a public bath, as a center for studies and as a common place for philosophers. The main idea of this project is to create a meeting place for the citizens. The building is configures into several exterior and interior areas where coexistence happens in a natural way. The project is divided into three parts, the first one, exterior, with a horizontal area ready to hold open air events. The second one defined as daily sports facilities, and the third one understood as the multipurpose gymnasium and spectators area, conceived as an area around the courts and directly linked to the park on the east side of the plot. The last part is the area with the common facilities such as dressing rooms, cafeteria and offices, all of them organized around those three main areas, ensuring the proper functioning of the building.
In order to use the maximum site area within the budget, initial design began with functional requirements of setback and parking circulation at the ground floor area. So, 1st floor area was defined by the space required for parking and use of common space. 2nd floor includes cafeteria and office area. 3rd floor was planned for classrooms for students during week days. The final 4th floor had been set to follow the required capacity of occupancies 250 for the church service for Sunday service.
The site is located urban area close to the down-town of Daegu, one of the biggest Cities in South Korea. In contrast to its locality, this town is isolated from the major city development. The community gets older, and young couples have been moving out to other towns to provide better education for their children.
The site is characterized, on the south and west side, by a homogeneous low-rise urban texture. To the north side, the site faces a long and narrow urban park which is stretched along a major circulatory artery. On the north side of the main road, high-rise housing block are distributed along the circulatory axis. On a urban level, one of the challenges of the project was to reconnect the diverse building scales existing in the surroundings area while providing the local community with an eye-catching, friendly integrated new public library.
Daegu-Gosan Park Library proposes a progressively ascending spiral that both creates a collaborative learning environment and dynamically merges with the life unfolding in the surrounding city park. The book-stacks wrapping the outer wall of the four-story spiral ramp facilitate browsing its walk of shared continuous knowledge.
The Daegu Library site is situated in the heart of city of Daegu, the 3rd largest city in South Korea.
The design of the library is imagined as a natural extension of local life in the surrounding area. By creating a flexible framework it sets up its main premise: defining an inviting new urban center for both people and knowledge.
This proposal conceives the library as a cultural and social space for the local community. For this purpose the project focuses in obtaining a functional, attractive and comfortable facility that constitutes an essential element for neighborhood´s everyday life. In order to achieve this objective, the project translates the scale of the domestic space to a public facility, without lack of its public dimension.
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