A punctuated façade

Bucheon is a satellite city of Seoul and the second most densely populated urban area in South Korea. It is here that Rearth Inc., a leading Korean distributor of smartphone accessories, recently opened its new headquarters. The building, designed by Bong Ki Choi – Lead Urban Architects & Planners, stands out from the anonymous surrounding landscape of low, heterogeneous buildings for the monolithic impact of its volume facing onto the street. The building has a regular parallelepiped shape without any special architectural features, a pure white volume punctuated by glazed sections. However, its contemporary language and expressive power emerges forcefully in the design of the envelope. The façade is clad entirely by ultra-thin ceramic panels in a 100×300 cm size from Cotto d’Este, chosen from the Black-White Kerlite 5plus collection in an Ultrawhite finish. These homogeneous hi-tech surfaces with their clean aesthetics, small thicknesses and large sizes coupled with the elasticity and strength typical of porcelain contrast with the glazed areas in a graphic play of transparencies and alternating solids and voids. An orthogonal geometric pattern based on an « orderly irregularity » infuses a sense of rhythm into the building façade and alleviates its visual impact. Windows of the same height but different widths alternate with narrow slit-like openings and large horizontal glazed sections that break up the vertical tension of the composition. A few small corner loggias have been created in what appears to be a process of subtraction. An entire glazed corner of the volume seems to melt away, exposing the structure of the staircase and its diagonal ramps, the sole departure from the rigorous orthogonality maintained by the building as a whole. The resultant volume, like a Mondrian painting, expresses an apparent simplicity and an intriguing rhythmic cadence that becomes even more vivid for an observer driving along the main road in front of the building.