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Architects: Society of Architecture
- Area: 2179 m²
- Year: 2023
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Photographs:Kyungsub Shin
Text description provided by the architects. Since its foundation in 1394, Seoul has transitioned from an agrarian society to a full-fledged industrialized megacity. Within this 600-year transition, it was the 20th century that saw the most drastic urban change due to a process of industrialization. During its colonial period under Japanese imperial rule (1910–45),Yeongdeungpo, southwest of the Han River, was developed with heavy military infrastructure. This laid the groundwork for this area to transform into Seoul’s largest industrial zone after liberation from Japan. Other industrial areas around Seoul followed, yet, as of 2021, only seven major semi-industrial zones in Seoul remain. They account for 3.3 percent of the city’s total area but are essential to its industrial economy.
Seoul’s industrial areas accommodate mostly light industries such as fashion, printing, and fabrication of metal parts, and jewelry. Although these zones are mostly made up of small businesses operating in relatively poor conditions, the Seoul Metropolitan Government is building a support system to invigorate the area with jobs production: since 2018, it has been funding ₩300 billion worth of manufacturing support to build ‘smart anchor’ facilities for each manufacturing industry. A ‘smart anchor’ is a space that allows small businesses that are burdened with purchasing high-tech facilities, like 3D printers, to have a base that they can use jointly. Smart anchors also promote collaboration between companies. Seoul City is aiming to build 20 smart anchors by 2022. Currently, five such sites have been confirmed for each autonomous district of the city, including ‘Jungnang-gu Sewing,’ ‘Jung-gu Printing,’ ‘Guro-gu Machinery Metal’, and ‘Gangbuk-gu Sewing.’ The Seongsu-dong neighborhood, in the district of Seongdong-gu, is projecting to run a facility that supports small craftsmen who make handmade shoes.
The Semi-Industrial Mix - Currently, semi-industrial areas in Seoul are distributed with light industries, interacting with residential centres, financial centers and business centers in other areas of Seoul. They are filled with dynamic flows of production-consumption players. Industrial areas were originally planned to form blocks and accommodate roads that are good for factory logistics, but various consumption/leisure activities overlap in these semi- industrial areas. Relevant laws and regulations of the building code have been revised to promote diversity of land use plans, unlike the originally designed factory zones. The industrial zones are no longer solely responsible for production but also for consumption and residential functions. From the perspective of the metropolitan city of Seoul, a certain range of factory zones are perceived by people as places with very strong identities and thus considered as spaces that provide an attractive opportunity for an urban experience, which is different from the uniformity of a typical residential space.
Seongsu-dong, in particular, was transformed into a place where specific images and values were recognized at a cultural level. The industrial cityscape of the factory zone is a special experience for visitors. An empty factory is gradually filled with attractive consumer products. Roads that once were occupied by raw materials, intermediate products, and finished products – handmade shoes – are being filled with pedestrians visiting the neighborhood. They are not producers in the manufacturing sector but consumers who visit Seongsu-dong from outside. The nature of urban streets will change from a logistics system for products to a pedestrian-oriented one, which mainly focuses on consumption activities and will acquire a multi-layered sense of place. Due to these changes, the new building in Seongsu-dong has a different openness from the existing factory construction. A new type of architecture is needed to expand the dense walking network of urban streets beyond simple factory buildings.
In the course of the semi-industrial area’s growth, the type of construction of the factory has evolved in an efficient way. Factories are vertically stacked to cope with the high density of the city center and are known in Korea as ‘apartment-type factories.’ The typical plan of this typology has a service core in the center and open work space on the periphery of that core. The buildings are usually tailored to universal standards that increase the efficiency of integrated apartments rather than specific spaces that take into account the working characteristics of particular manufacturing industries. On the other hand, production in small manufacturing industries is based on flexible systems, with a tacit form of information distribution that can only be obtained in the field, integrated with skilled technicians, and an organic environment for collaboration and division. Manufacturing industries concentrated in large cities also form an integrated economy, with production and consumption closely related. While typical specialized industrial areas are formed by concentrating industries or enterprises producing the same product, urban manufacturing coexists with various urban activities from production to consumption. It emphasizes individuality and specificity, small production of various kinds, and specificity corresponding to individual demands of various ordering entities. ‘Apartment-type factory’ architecture struggles to digest the specificity of this urban manufacturing industry. As the production function of the city shifts to the knowledge industry, the backwardness of the light industry and the manufacturing industry is accelerating.
Vertically Serviced Workspaces - The handmade shoe industry structure in Seongsu-dong does not allow small manufacturers to make their own brands, but instead depends on subcontractors that supply products ordered by the main office. While existing urban factories emphasize only efficient production, the Metropolitan Small Manufacturers’ Support Center (MSMSC) aims to innovate production space by reflecting the recent start-up space trend in which production, planning, distribution, marketing and consumption are integrated into one space. The new tower-type factory is a three-dimensional space for consumption and production, which compresses the geography of the product distribution chain from planning, design, marketing, and consumption. As part of the MSMSC, in 2019 SoA (Society of Architecture) proposed the Seongsu-Silo as an adaptive reuse project. Under development for construction at the time of writing, the Seongsu-Silo aims to foster collaboration and industrial innovation through space branding targeting small business owners.
Small craftsmen’s workspaces are placed on each floor within an open plan. For this to work as a vertical factory, three vertical ancillary spaces are added at the front, emphasized as independent volumes, for displays, promotional activities, storage, conferences, lectures, or other customizable purposes that new factories and support centers may need, as well as an open stairway. In between, the public space allows the service areas of the front part to be opened to the outside independently. A ‘maker column’ built of red brick, previously a common material for factories around Seongsu-dong, is used to extend the urban landscape of the past. A ‘shoe silo’ is exposed with glass to the front and brick to the rear, allowing it to be recognised as a visually open, independent space. External evacuation stairs commonly found in Seongsu-dong become a ‘vertical walkway’ for pedestrians to feel a vertical continuity of the urban streets.
Industrial Continuity Through Renovation and Expansion - By preserving the upper face of the front – although not the interior space – of the pre-existing building, the continuity of the scenery seen on the streets of Seongsu-dong’s factory zone is ensured. The construction strategy of the MSMSC is essentially one of expansion. In addition to the mitigation of the designation of building lines, the basic strategy of remodeling here was to preserve the history of Seongsu-dong by leaving the first-floor façade of the pre-existing building and its ground-floor columns, which embrace the newly created area, including the service towers and make for a complex entry experience. In particular, this generates the identity of the building by establishing a relationship between the old and the new: the old building’s pillars and the multistorey ‘column’ elements of the new construction. It also serves as a pilotis or a fence, naturally luring urban walkers into the building and lowering the psychological boundaries of the entry process.
Factory buildings constructed with the minimum requirements for use have their own industrial aesthetics. The material palettes on the streets of Seongsu-dong are filled with common architectural languages based on practicality and economy. Most of the existing factories here are modernist structures built by filling concrete frames with bricks, a typical type of construction in the area. The architecture of the MSMSC proposal uses familiar materials to preserve the landscape of the street, but it is intended to respect and develop the place by changing its use. The core of the deployment is to place human-scale spatial elements on the road elevation at the front that can create connections between people in the manufacturing industry’s branding process, such as planning, distribution, and marketing. Workspaces are planned to be flexible and are located at the rear of the site.
The ground floor can be extended vertically to the first floor through the upper opening. Space is compartmentalized through a moving wall if necessary to form a flexible multi-purpose volume. Floor materials inside and out are made of the same continuous material and create a space open to the rear through the folding door. As a way to integrate the old structure, the pillars at the ground level of the existing building serve as an entrance to the main office. A second entry hall is created through the new massing, which connects the public directly to the public corridor.
System for Flexible Work Production - As the Seongsu-Silo aims to becoming an industrial anchor, it requires a flexible dynamic with its context, as well as within itself. The balcony located inside the workspace and the outer curtain walls on both sides create a pleasant working environment. Reinforced- concrete walls were secured to facilitate the installation of workstations and shelves. The service columns strengthen the characteristics of the public spaces by incorporating decorative bricks used externally into indoor materials. A plane consisting of manufacturing, production space exchange, network space distribution, planning, and marketing space enables a one-stop service. Casual meetings between small business owners and consumers take place in a space at the front. The variable planar composition reacts by organically transforming to suit the environment of various events and occupied spaces. In addition, the service space placed towards the road allows the workspace to be freely extended from side to side.
Through architectural articulation, spatial flexibility can be achieved, yet a smart anchor requires urban flexibility to be maintained. This hybrid typology encapsulates these requirements through the grafting of forms and use of materials to create a dichotomy of transparent public and opaque private areas in order to humbly promote industry and culture.
