The winners of the seventh annual Restaurant & Bar Design Awards—the only awards in the world dedicated to the design of food and beverage spaces—have been announced in London. Out of over 860 entries from the United Kingdom and 70 other countries, 36 designs were awarded, with two grand prize winners.
The winners of the Restaurant & Bar Design Awards are:
South KoreanHaeahn Architecture, in collaboration with New-York-based H Architecture, has won a competition to design the Smart Work Center and Press Center at the historic site of the National Assembly Complex in Yeoido, which is the largest island in the Han River in Seoul.
The 23,750-square-meter building will be flexible in its uses and support "legislative functions of the National Assembly." Overall it will “house five distinctive programs: a press center with a briefing room alongside a small broadcast facility with a workplace for reporters; a highly-equipped smart work center which serves as a remote workplace for commuting officers and Ministers for the government; supplementary office spaces; underground parking; and welfare facilities which will include a restaurant, a banquet hall, and a retail component that will be accessible to both government workers and the general public.”
The Seoul Metropolitan Government has announced its Sejong-daero Historic Cultural Space Design Competition, which seeks creative designs for the site of the former National Tax Service Building, as well as a greater conceptual blueprint for the central Seoul area.
MVRDV has won a competition to transform an abandoned elevated highway next to Seoul's Central Station into a 938 meter-long skygarden. The ambitious project, dubbed the "Seoul Skygarden," aims to "build on the city's ambition to be greener, more attractive and more user-friendly," while acting as a catalyst for the surrounding neighborhoods. 254 species of trees, shrubs and flowers will take over the overpass, creating a unique "library of plants" organized according to the Korean alphabet. Even more, the skygarden will cut pedestrian commutes to the station by more than half, reducing the walk from 25 to 11 minutes.
Seoul-based architecture and art practice Planning Korea has unveiled their design for a seaside resort hotel, to host visitors to the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea. Offering 946 rooms and sprawling across a 29,493-square-meter site, the hotel will offer a combination of marine and mountain leisure activities.