JIM Finalist in Cheongju City Hall Design Competition
JIM’s proposal is shortlisted with four other teams in Phase 2 of the competition. JIM and three other firm from Phase 1 joined Snøhetta, Daniel Libeskind and Dominique Perrault. Snøhetta won the competition, Dominic Paurrelt (France) in second place and Haean Architects (Korea) in third place. Other firms receiving honorable mention include Libeskind, Design Lab Studio (Korea), TYPS.Lab (Korea), and Ilgu Gugong City Architecture Architects Office (Korea).
Prof. Jun-Sung Kim (Chairman of the Jury) of Konkuk University, John Enright of the United States, Ma Yansong of China, Peer Jeppesen of Denmark, and Professor Jae-Kyung Kim of Hanyang University comprised the jury.
While JIM did not win the competition we were honored to participate in the unique event and share our ideas for a new civic building in Cheongju. Rather than simply describe our project, we want to say more about the process. As educators, we hope our process can serve as a precedent (good or bad) for young architects looking to engage in more complex competitions.
James Huemoeller and Thomas Hogge (Other Lands Studio)
As a small office that intends to stay small, we carefully manage our workload to avoid taking on too much work at one time. Our managed workload means we occasionally have downtime we can fill with competition entries. As with many small design studios, we wanted to use competitions to test out our ideas about urbanism, architecture, and landscape.
Phase 1
Interest in this specific competition came down to a desire to engage an urban context and make a statement on our cities' future. Our office has neither the talent nor the inclination to make the singular architectural gestures most competitions require. On the other hand, this competition gave us a platform for developing an architecture that sought to enhance the public character of the project and, through the project, improve the city's overall resiliency.
Our Phase 1 proposal centred on a horizontal planning scheme building on two ongoing Cheongju-Si initiatives: the Urban Regeneration project and Green Cheongju. The former drove our proposal's direct engagement with the street: a ring of public-facing program along a porous colonnade that opens only for interior lanes to invite people into the New City Hall and through the site. The latter materialised through a series of planted landscapes emphasising the potential for new urban ecologies within the city.
The horizontal scheme provided the city with a free volume of space for various functions as the City Hall's needs evolve. The 'form follows function' principle of modern architecture is problematic; as society evolves and functions change, overly specific forms become meaningless. Through its adaptability, our project remains vibrant: citizen "convenience spaces" transition to work offices for a growing City Hall. As needs diminish, offices convert to other functions for the city.
Furthermore, the grounded scheme connects the public and city administration as directly and efficiently as possible. Looking at precedents, including the Seoul City Hall, we questioned the performance of the atrium. Often highlighted as a "public venue", we instead saw the atrium as a redundant space that internalised the street's former activity. Atriums tend to promote a twentieth-century procession that assumes users will approach in a motor vehicle, proceed into the parkade, up the elevator, into the conditioned atrium, and to the point of business. The choreographed sequence positions the city as a barrier to the journey instead of a critical actor.
As a result, our streets are no longer public spaces. Over the last 100+ years, streets have evolved from public mixing chambers to ever-widening moats that erode our urban fabric. In response to these losses, and to motivate productive and dynamic streets, we set two rules: 1) make no redundant exterior spaces, and 2) make all exterior areas critical to the building performance.
Rather than set the building back with an urban plaza that competes with the new Cheongju Station plaza, we brought the building out to the streets as much as legally possible to reinforce the street once again as an urban place for chance encounters. To maintain connectivity through the large complex, the network of interior streets surrounding the existing City Hall tie the campus into the city and create a truly public, inverted "atrium" for the project. These multi-functional shared surfaces provided the city with durable spaces for major events, protests, or just a place for people to watch the city government's comings and goings.
Phase 2
As we moved from phase 1 to phase 2, we brought on a series of consultants to further develop the project. BAUM helped our office understand the code issues while tailoring our initial concept to Korean culture. ALIVEUS played a similar role in their collaboration with OLW on the landscape design. These latter two consultants also contributed a significant effort to producing drawings with JIM providing backgrounds that they would subsequently enrich. In general, the whole team met a few times on Zoom throughout the project while JIM and Baum met nearly every day to coordinate with specific consultants. More could be said on the collaboration process, but each consultant contributed a significant amount of time with no real likelihood of being repaid for their effort. I have no idea how the other offices worked but having a full team was critical to allowing our office to take risks we might not otherwise have taken, and we cannot overstate their contribution.
Unfortunately, between phase 1 and 2, the competition committee increased the size of the required setbacks. Furthermore, we also learned that the zoning requirements were less flexible than we anticipated for a public project, a common issue for most Korean codes. This change forced us to make the difficult choice to eliminate the colonnade. In our minds, the colonnade only functioned if it covered the sidewalk. To have another pathway run parallel to the sidewalk would break our "no redundancy" rule. With the public-facing program still addressing the street, we eliminated the "porch" of our building and concentrated on the interior streets as the "lobby". True, people who move through this exterior "lobby" might get wet on a rainy day, but it also means getting out into free air, the chance to meet friends and colleagues on the street, and in general, the potential for a balanced, sustainable work environment.
The growth of sustainable cities also depends on improving the integration of ecological stewardship into city planning efforts. This project leverages landscape urbanism and urban ecology principles with the rooftop and a series of four courts. In Phase 1, without the benefit of a landscape architect, this idea materialised in an over the top and uninteresting forest on the roof. As we moved into Phase 2, we turned to the landscape architecture firms to re-render that idea with more rigour and interest.
The landscape strategy focused on three primary objectives:
·Promote democratic use of public space, characterised by openness and flexibility
· Maximise the performance of the landscape systems, including increased ecological value, biodiversity, and resilience
· Minimise human input and impact of the rooftop ecological reserve
These may be generic goals but naming them early allowed our team to explore the ways such lofty ideals could be realised immediately. We quickly recognised the need for the intensive rooftop forests, central to the Phase 1 scheme, to be productive in real terms, both ecological and cultural. To this end, our South Korean collaborators provided critical feedback and context around the significance of forests, nature-based recreation programs, and other forest-centred experiences. We leapt on a tree plantation's economic production potential, leaning on research links to Green Cheongju and earlier 20th century initiatives that used reforestation to repair ecological systems and community relationships in the South Korean peninsula. To achieve our landscape performance and maintenance goals, the planting design uses a rigorous layout of iconic and ubiquitous species in Korea. Arranging the planted layers in alternating grids achieves both a remarkable informality and a sense of wilderness, and promotes clear and minimal management.
These strategies overlaid the earlier ideas on streets and public space and were then deployed in each of the three significant landscapes types in the project:
Ways: As mentioned, these fully public interior streets and plazas bring the dynamic qualities and characters of Cheongju city into the grounds of the New City Hall. As durable and flexible surfaces, these spaces cross east-to-west across the City Hall campus and extend an existing public plaza network. The streets transform into shared surfaces where vehicles cede primacy to pedestrians. This pedestrian-focused concept extends south of the project site and anticipates the extension and amplification of the adjacent pedestrian walking street. The urban networks extension directly into our project warranted the expressive continuous, granite paved surface that extended up the interior facades, stopping just short of our roof.
Courts: The project engages the classic and climatically performative courtyard typology. But rather than merely imagining the courts as spatial or architectural voids, we position the courts as strong horticultural figures that organise the City Hall experience. These semi-public spaces provide alternative access to space for rest or recreation, and intimacy or interaction. Each courtyard is accessible from each building's dynamic and adaptive facades, allowing the courts to support adjacent interior programs fully.
Roof: We imagined the living roof as a highly constructed ground, thick with opportunity, intensely and intentionally not naturalistic. The folded forms use soil as the foundation for robust ecological futures: its several "pleats" also evoke the nearby mountains and floodplain rivers. This hyper-natural emphasis on microtopography and microclimate promotes change, difference, and horticultural experimentation. The gridded planting provides cues to care, emphasising native and resilient species, and frames both expansive views and intimate spaces. The roof garden is still accessible as an ecological reserve, linked by bridges and ramps to City Hall, which becomes a centring and anchoring institutional figure.
In line with the development of the landscapes, the expanded team, with WSP's Sustainability Group's essential support, developed a series of sustainable systems more fully in Phase 2. The engineering consultants' research and creativity helped envision a biomass energy plant providing power and heat to the project and, with expansion into the parkade, the adjacent neighbourhoods. The plant capitalises on Korea's regenerated forests to push Cheongju-Si on the path to becoming a zero-carbon city, furthering our aims to meet the real and immediate challenges of climate change, and promoting a City Hall more deeply embedded in the spatial and cultural practices of the city than a mere architectural icon.
This theme carried into the structural design where one of the buildings used mass timber, further embedding the forest into the project. Initially, we hoped to build the entire structure out of wood, but as we worked, it became clear the emerging industry still was not at a stage that could support a project of this scale from a code and cost perspective. Therefore, we compromised, building only the main assembly space out of wood to showcase woods potential in Korea.
As they work together, the urban and ecological frameworks underpinning our project form a public venue that not only accommodates the city's growth and evolution but also fosters and advances it.
Conclusion
With the development of our Phase 2 proposal, we submitted on the 6th of July. In total, we presented our project with eight competitions boards, a twenty-two-page A3 description of the project, two models (required to be white) at 1:300 and 1:600 scale, and a video presentation. One could only imagine the hours put into the project by all the teams, assuredly, much more time and money than the generous stipend the competition distributed could cover.
A week later, after the jury, now comprised of foreign jury members, reviewed the work, we presented our project online with a short video. While we have done competitions in the past, they were not, of course, amid a pandemic, and the final event's virtual theatrics took us by surprise. Live-streamed on Instagram, the jury and audience watched as the teams presented their work, the Korean firms in person and the foreign firms virtually. After that, each team had roughly five minutes for questions from the jury. As local restrictions closed our office, we did our best to set up convincing lighting and background for our presentation and question period. Still, we could never entirely eliminate a stray toddler or barking dog's potential interruption despite our efforts. A challenge many are familiar with now.
The presentations and Q&A periods transitioned to a suspenseful wait while we watched the live stream of the jury deliberating, without sound naturally. In the end, it came down to a dramatic reveal when the competition organisers wheeled out the winning competition model to the flashing lights of photographers' cameras. Even in the small Instagram box, it was immediately clear that it was not a horizontally organised scheme with a roof garden.
Obviously, in Phase 2, where several high-profile firms with proven track records joined the competition, along with a significantly greater resource demand for the deliverables, our chance for success as a small firm greatly diminished. Ultimately, Snohetta deservedly won the competition with a strong and exciting scheme that met the competition's intent. For us, there were many lessons from the experience. When we transitioned from Phase 1 to 2, the competition asked us whether we wanted to carry forward with the competition. At the time, we did not hesitate, but I can see why some small firms would not want to take the risk in hindsight. There is a significant investment in a competition at this scale, and for a firm like ours, it can take all your resources, whether it is time or money. We cannot likely participate again in a similar competition constantly with the same commitment level.
Simultaneously, the process gave us a lot more confidence and opened new doors for our practice. For one, the collaboration with our Korean partners was enriching and gave us a new perspective on how we approach our work. Furthermore, it was a real opportunity to resolve a bit more ideas we held strongly and focused our practice more for what we hope to achieve in the future. It is rare in practice to have the opportunity to focus on one project for a lengthy period working with talented consultants who can help grow your ideas. In school, you rarely have the opportunity for collaboration, and in practice, you are far too focused on AHJ's, budgets and contractors to have the conversations you want. While we are disappointed not to win, that collaborative experience will remain with us for some time and represents the best of what competitions of this type offer.