Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

Early design sketch of the lake looking north, showing wetlands and
allotments on the left side of the lake, new ‘urban forests’ as long strips
perpendicular to the lake edge, the new straight lake edge on the right side
of the lake, and the new town edge to the lake with ramping harbour.
The Cospuden mining excavation process has uncovered 50 million years of
geological history. This aerial photograph shows how the process has turned
the area into an apocalyptic morass of waste and water.
mass was then to be fragmented by alleyways for easy
pedestrian access. Thus an infrastructural framework was
created overall to play host to human settlements, themselves
unconstrained by urgent time-framing.
ARU’s architecture here includes completed buildings of
an exemplary quality. Beigel’s ethos has been to conceive
buildings of a clear, tectonic, but simple profile, which
respect the existing and reclaimed landscape. As
demonstrated by their Stone units, and already realised
offices for the Youl Hwa Dang Publishing House, which act
as a bridge across the wetlands, this allows definitive aspects
of the architecture to relate naturally to the site terrain and
ecology, as well as to distant views.
One of ARU’s major breakthroughs at Paju Book City has
been a recognition of the high ecological value of the residual
wetlands that characterise the original site. These were,
according to an outmoded plan, to be filled in and gravelled
over. However, Beigel’s defining decision was to reverse this
implementation, and so to save the natural ecology of reeds
and grasses that could now take the form of the ‘picnic’ on
the rug. According to ARU: ‘It is necessary to tread carefully in
this delicate land, in a way a giraffe would walk through high
grass.’ Essentially, the architects therefore prepared a plan of
‘where not to fill the land’. This aspect of the overall plan
remains but, as Beigel says, is always at risk of despoliation by
commercial or governmental bodies, though some progress in
enlightening such bodies has been made.
By autumn 2000, when architects were starting to be
commissioned to realise individual buildings according to the
Paju Design Guide, Mr Yi Ki Ung, President of the Youl Hwa
Dang Publishing House, commissioned Florian Beigel and
ARU, London, in collaboration with Kim Jong Kyu and MARU,
Seoul, to design his own building. This building was to act as a
prototype, a built demonstration of the urban concepts in the
Paju Design Guide. The building is best described as a cluster
of studio houses around courtyards, or ‘madangs’. The principle
of ‘a house of good rooms’ (in Beigel’s words) was followed,
whereby one goes from room to room. This is not a house with
an open plan, or of corridors and separate rooms, it is a house
of rooms without corridors. But this clarity also reflects the
way the city is laid out, allowing for an unusual degree of
coherence through each and every scale of living and moving.
The colours of the studio houses, their walls and bookshelves
are painted consistently in a palette similar to that developed
by the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi – soft and subtle, with
equal emphasis placed on the spaces between elements
(houses, rooms, shelves) as on the solid or transparent
volumes. One of the walls of every room in the studio houses
is a wall of light, created using light-diffusing materials.
Turning again to the landscape form, Beigel found that the
site reflects a strong north–south linearity, as read from the
Han River’s long, but wide, impact on the land itself. This is
emphasised by the Simhak Mountain in Paju, which seems to
guard the city. It was this linearity that generated the whole
concept of the book city, as a kind of built landscape text. It is
also hoped that the Freedom Highway, which connects Paju
City to the centre of Seoul, will one day become the direct
connection to North Korea. The land and flood plain of the
Han River was the site of extremely bloody battles during the
Korean War, thus the highway has more than just a
topographical significance.
Paju Book City, in Beigel’s words, is conceived as a territory
of coexistence: ‘We called it urban wetland. In more general
terms we call it a “citylandscape”. Paju Book City will be
neither a city nor will it be a built-up landscape. It will be
both. In this way it will be a classical example for the
contemporary urban condition. It is not a landscape design
project, and it is not an urban design project. It is an
93