Finally I visited the Dongdaemun Design Plaza, in short DDP, which opened on March 21st. As you can already tell by the name, it lies in the famous Dongdaemun shopping area. This very futuristic building is the new hub for design and modern culture in Korea. It is also very photogenic design, so I took pictures with my phone and GoPro (so some pictures have a wide-angle, fish-eye effect!). If you want to see better pictures, please go to Robert Koehler’s Flickr-page or to his Tumblr. Let’s explore the Dongdaemun Design Plaza together.
History of the Dongdaemun Design Plaza
Originally on the ground of the DDP was a baseball stadium and a multi-functional sport stadium. The history of the sport stadium goes back to 1925. If you click here, you can see a picture from 1955. Later the two stadiums have been constructed. In 2003 the sport stadium was closed and it became a parking garage. It also hosted a large flea market, which is part of the controversy. The baseball stadium next to it was used until 2007. A new stadium, we wrote about it here, will be built in Guro and it is expected to open in 2015.
In 2007 Seoul hold an international design competition for that area. It was based on an invitation-only system and among the seven competitors, there have been four Koreans (one of them designed the new City Hall of Seoul!), Zaha Hadid, Steven Holl and FOA. Hadid won because her design had a “successful combination of landscape and architecture and expressed a strong image of design in pedestrian’s view” (Seouldesign Webzine). If you are interested in the eight concepts, you can see them on this blog.
The construction begun in 2009 and it was finished in November 2013. The total size of the project is 85,320 square-meters and the buildings use 25,008 square-meters. The construction costs of the DDP were 450 million US dollar.
The Design
Zaha Hadid calls the design of the DDP a “metonymic landscape”. Metony-what? Wiktionary defines metonymy as “The use of a single characteristic or name of an object to identify an entire object or related object.” OK, it doesn’t help us a lot to understand this concept. The webzine of Seouldesign explained the concept and its meaning:
Zaha Hadid paid attention to the general flow of Dongdaemun and its features which are differentiated every hour. DDP is positioned in ‘Metonymic landscape’ as a space linking park with design center physically and as a composition of park design not largely differing from Korean traditional garden design.
The design is amazing and very unique. Even more astonishing than the shape of the building is the inside. I don’t know how many Korean elements are integrated but it’s something very new in Korean urbanism. The majority of people seem to like the DDP very much. For sure Seoul built a new tourist attraction and a place for exhibitions or special events.
Park Won-soon said that the DDP is ugly and it does not fit in the surrounding. Actually, the current mayor criticizes all large-scale projects in this article of the Korea Times. So probably the current mayor would have never allowed something like that to be built. Many call it an “alien spaceship“. And yeah, it looks little bit like a spaceship just landed:
Controversy
Every large-scale project has a controversial debate. One of the general issues is that the new plaza does not value the history. If you look at the other designs, you can see more resemblance to the stadiums. Therefore, two floodlights, which look like from a baseball stadium, were integrated in the Dongdaemun History and Culture Park. Another problem was this:
Historic artifacts were discovered while digging in the ground. Every city with a long history has such an issue. And there are more problems about the Dongdaemun Design Plaza. They are summarized on Listen to the City (in Korean and English) and in this video: http://vimeo.com/43113613
There are also political issues, which begun with displacing street vendors due to the Cheonggyecheon project. The video explains it well. So I would conclude that the implementation of the Dongdaemun Design Plaza and the park wasn’t the best but the building and design is great. Aren’t modernism and design the things, which Dongdaemun should stand for?
Related Sources and Information: Seoul Design | Zaha Hadid Architects
I’m sorry to sound harsh, but this article explains almost NOTHING about the building or its design concept, beside “yeah, ‘metonym’ is a weird word” and just leaves it there. Come on. This site is supposed to be about design, architecture, and space. Or is this just a random place to blog?
Hadid’s notion of ‘metonymic space’ revolves around taking her design concept of “Parametricism” to design spaces according to mathematical algorithms that fit the digital, variable world. Put in normal language, the DDP main buiilding takes advantage of Seoul’s “flexible sociality” (see Cho Myeong-Rae) here) by acting as a “multi-modal” space that ADAPTS YTO THE SOCIAL USE OF THOSE USING IT. The concrete way to understand this is by looking at the way the ramp from street to sub-street level is used during Seoul Fashion Week, when that “ramp” becomes a street fashion runway, a staging ground for ppl shooting the online fashion catalogs, a site for networking, a marketplace for the HERA cosmetics and other kiosks, and a de facto red carpet for people coming in off the street. It also acts as a “step-down” zone from normal social space to fashion-charged social space, kind of like a social airlock of sorts. In short, it allows for multiple social uses to naturally pop up and overlap without mutual interference. It’s a unique space that allows this, which Patrik Shumacher and Zaha Hadid predicted in their proposal, and which sounded like a whole lotta cockamamie bullshit until such time as the space went into USE. DDP now is doing EXACTLY what Hadid Architects SAID it would be, well before the fact. but now, DDP itself has become a mMETONYM for fashion, forward-thinking design, for coolness, for the Seoul Fashion week event, for the very notion of the city of Seoul itself.