Staircase / Bang Keun Yoo
location: A piece of land located on the mountainside at an altitude of 520 meters above sea level, surrounded by several layers of land, resembling terraced rice fields. From there, you can enjoy a complete 360-degree view of the surrounding landscape. On the southern side, the South Sea is about 50 km away. On the northern side, the western side is covered by a mountain with stone walls (built with local rocks) and a dense forest. The road leads steeply up, then descends again, passing new house sites, and ending at a steep dead end.
space: The clients, a modest couple, did not have any specific requirements regarding the functionality of the design; They were, by the way, quite open. In such a case, I created a full-day scenario based on human movements indoors and outdoors and separated it from the physical conditions of the ground. This finally led to a mysterious figure. Being in nature, the form must be simple, and the materials must appear as if they have coexisted for a long time with the elements surrounding them. The simple shape of square bars allows for a certain linear function. Since the plot of land was not wide, the bars were bent into the ground like a sponge. The curved sections of the square bar become a corridor (stair) connecting the second floor as a folding fan. The curved sections were raised to frame the main entrance.
On the eastern side, the walls have been removed, allowing morning sunlight to flood the sleeping areas. The continuous linear space moves to a bedroom, living room and dining room on the second floor and then ends in a guest room at the top of the dining room without walls. Bedroom balconies, living room balconies, and guest room balconies embody the movements between indoors and outdoors. The skylights and openings, which create variations in light, change according to the interconnections between each space, seasonally and over time, enriching and adding depth to the narrow, long and simple interior space.
Relative importance: The solid stone retaining wall in the background deeply impacts the square blocks of the house. The same DNA as the stone wall was implanted into the home’s envelope. Initially, the patterns of the stone retaining walls were standardized to form the entire facade. The small gaps of the retaining wall were replaced with glass blocks, creating light openings and reducing the heavy perception of the structure. The rough texture of the stone wall removes the outer shell of the square blocks, creating uniformity while evoking the light terracotta color to enhance the scene. This effort also aims to create genetic homogeneity between the surrounding landscape visible from the land and the newly formed square blocks.
#Staircase #Bang #Keun #Yoo
