The new 300-room, five-star-rated Sheraton Incheon Hotel recently opened in New Songdo City, Korea, offering a new state-of-the-art facility in the heart of a new urban center.
HOK provided architectural design, landscape design and sustainable design services for the new 500,000-square-foot, LEED® certified hotel.
More images and architect’s description after the break.
Adjacent to the city’s new Convention Center, the Northeast Asia Trade Tower and a large retail mall, the hotel is connected to the buildings through a series of plazas and landscaped areas, and underground by a parking structure spanning the site. The tower section of the hotel includes 300 guestrooms and suites, a presidential suite and an executive lounge on the top floor. Hotel amenities, including ballrooms, function rooms, spa, gym, pool, restaurants and bar, are located on the five lower levels of the wing adjacent to the tower.
Sustainable strategies helped guide the hotel design. The façades of the hotel rooms are faceted to minimize the exposure to direct solar gain, and this reduced solar load is shaded further by custom vertical sunshading devices.
“The facades of the guestroom tower were specifically designed to be broken into four-story-tall, two-room-wide modules that are fractured and angled further away from direct solar radiation,” says HOK New York Design Director Kenneth Drucker, FAIA, LEED AP. “As a final detail, each of these modules is shaded by two, four-story-tall perforated aluminum sunshades.” The lower, amenity wing of the hotel is wrapped in a reflective, metal roof that shades portions of the glazed facades below.
New Songdo City exists as a prototype model of new city expansion and development, designed to be self-sustaining neighborhoods with connective links to surrounding urban centers. It is located on the west coast of Korea, and is connected to the new Incheon International Airport by Yeongjong Bridge, and ties to the existing urban context of Incheon. The major transportation links define a central zone of the city where a denser zone of commercial and mixed-use projects surround a large central park.
Within the master plan of the New Songdo City urban center, HOK is also design architect for four separate mixed-use projects. Spanning the length of the northern edge of the park are Blocks D22, D23 and D24, which are mixed-use development sites of residential and commercial space.
HOK is a global architectural firm that specializes in planning, design and delivery solutions for buildings and communities. Through its collaborative network of 23 offices worldwide, the firm serves diverse clients within the corporate, commercial, public and institutional markets. HOK is committed to developing resources and expertise to help lead the world toward sustainable communities and building environments. Founded in 1955, the firm’s expertise includes architecture, engineering, interiors, planning, lighting, graphics, facilities planning and assessment and construction services.
