This city of Gyeongju in South Korea is going to accommodate a new headquarters for the Korea Hydro Nuclear Power (KHNP) Company, one of the nation’s most advanced energy institutions. Designed by H Architecture, the project is to be built on the site surrounded by rich historical heritage and is required to represent KHNP’s dynamic pursuit to purvey the world’s cleanest and safest methods of producing energy. Alongside the historical context, the new KHNP headquarters must also consider the rural, mountainous landscape of the site, which lies low at the center surrounded by adjacent small mountains. More images and architects’ description after the break.
The city is one of the most historically significant cities in the country and East Asia. Once the capital of the Shilla Dynasty, one of most prosperous and long-lasting dynasties of Korea’s 5,000-year national history, the city takes pride in preserving a great number of Korea’s oldest architecture and national treasures. Due to the project’s conditions, as well as the social and political implications of the program, the design must be approached with careful consideration for the site and also with an innovative form that graciously illustrates the dynamism of hydro-nuclear energy. To do this, the massing of the building emerges from an adjacent mountainside and grows upward in an elliptical plan, referencing the orbiting of electrons of an atom. This gesture creates a graceful centripetal form that also seamlessly relates to the immediate landscape.
