Gust & Gale & Oscar (2024 Top Excellence Award)

Photo: ⓒ Lee Hanul

This joint headquarters project by two companies chose the incentive of coexistence over rigid territorial division, creating a positive environment that reflects the relationship with the surrounding area and maintains a unified architectural context between the two buildings.

Gangnam's boulevards share a resemblance to modern Korean society's compulsion to assert presence. Within the artificial development grid, the commercial pursuit of value and buildings that reject contextual cohesion can only be identified by the name of the boulevard they face.

The open plaza at the front and the pedestrian passage cutting through revive the visual imagination inherent to streets, while multi-layered greenery filling the empty spaces offers urban gardens to passersby. Private and public realms need not be in conflict. Could architecture's public responsibility be fulfilled not only through physical returns but also through the realization of intangible values? This project poses that modest question.