The windows of this artwork gallery in South Korea’s Paju district are fritted with a pattern that regulates views of the interior, and creates the illusion of fog about the edges of the developing .
Created by neighborhood architecture company SsD, White Block Gallery is the largest building in the Heyri Artwork Village, a museum complex featuring workshops, movie studios, bookshops and cafes that is located an hour by auto from the South Korean capital, Seoul.
It houses one,500 square metres of exhibition and cultural spaces committed to international modern art.
The creating is divided into three sound gallery volumes, assisting to reduce its overall visual mass. These are linked by transparent surfaces that form interstitial spaces, housing seven extra exhibition platforms.
The various proportions of these spaces, as well as their varying lighting problems, current a assortment of options for displays of sculpture, paintings or multimedia installations.
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“Every single solid gallery box is imagined of as a pavilion that is both suspended above the landscape or placed on top of it,” mentioned the architects. “The reliable boxes capture shadows of adjacent trees even though the transparent boxes reflect the distant landscape.”
A fritted pattern applied to the glass determines which elements of the interior are visible from outside, such as a fire stair at 1 corner that offers views out across the park.
The gradient pattern is designed to resemble mist shrouding the exterior, but also helps to regulate the amount of direct sunlight reaching the interior.
“The fritting pattern takes on far more figural volumes to produce regions of privacy and publicity,” said the undertaking crew. “The shapes merge with the patterns of early morning fog.”
A concave glazed surface – the centre’s only curve – includes the principal entrance. The huge window on the opposite facade makes it possible to look straight via in the direction of the close by lake and wetlands.
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Dark wood flooring and a lower ceiling give the entry a more intimate feel than the adjacent total-height circulation area.
This central void is made up of stairs and bridges connecting the various galleries, as nicely as huge windows that offer a further link to the outdoors.
A set of broad measures intersected by a wooden ramp allows the area to also perform as a lecture hall or screening area.
“The ‘interior ground’ is conceived of as a topography that is immediately linked to the landscape layout,” said the architects. “Formal galleries for artwork are adjacent to informal social spaces.”
The irregular arrangement of the strong volumes over three storeys final results in exhibition spaces with different heights located close to the void, whilst the bridges can also be used as galleries.
The supporting framework comprises slender columns organized close to the periphery, which enhances the visibility of the surroundings from within and removes the require for possibly obstructive factors within the galleries.
Heyri Artwork Village is a hybrid tourist attraction and colony, populated by hundreds of artists, writers, photographers and designers. It is property to the Álvaro Siza-created Mimesis Museum, as effectively as Paju Guide City – a large publishing neighborhood that consists of buildings by New York’s Stan Allen Architects and Korean company Unsangdong Architects.
Photography is by Chang Kyun Kim.
Ground floor plan 
First floor program 
Area Dezeen
