Spaces Breathing Culture, Seoul Architecture Tour

Eat, play, and enjoy all day in one space!

Trips nowadays are not simply for eating good food and going shopping. We crave visual satisfaction and emotional stimulation that cannot be found in our daily routines. Culture complexes that provide a variety of experiences are the new hot chip in the travel scene. Today we are going to check out a culture complex for eating, seeing, and feeling in Seoul that "breathes" culture with the significance of its architecture and spatial aesthethic.

Full of Stories of the Neighborhood, its Brands, and People

#LCDCSEOUL #SeoungsuIndustrialBelt

Now a popular destination among the millennials and zoomers, Seongu-dong used to be an industrial belt in downtown Seoul up until a few decades ago with its concentration of large-scale factories. The manufacturing business which brought a boom to the area in the 1960’s started to die down over time, bringing an end to the golden age of shoe factories, ironworks, and repair shops in Seongsu-dong, or Seongsu for short. The large plots of land where factories once stood remained empty for a long time. Recently, Seongsu has started to cultivate a new cultural trend. Small businesses and brands coexist, although in separate spaces, alongside each other in a single building. Taking advantage of the benefits of a larger space, the culture complexes of Seongsu have gathered to reward visitors with various restaurants, specialized boutiques, and galleries.

LCDC SEOUL was built where an auto repair shop and a shoe manufacturing factory once existed. A building was added to the existing two factory buildings to recreate the space into a culture complex. It's hard to find any traces of the old auto shop, but the dark gray concrete walls wrapping around LCDC SEOUL still blend seamlessly into the surrounding industrial landscape. When you enter under the huge concrete wall, you are greeted with a courtyard that opens up against the blue sky. The courtyard, surrounded by a cantilever^* structure with a 13-meter-long concrete wall floating off the ground, overpowers its surroundings while creating a calm atmosphere.

** Cantilever : A rigid structural element that extends horizontally and is supported at only one end.

You start the morning with a sweet dessert and cup of tea in the first floor cafe, move up to the second and third floor for different cultural experiences, and reach the bar on the fourth floor around sundown for a drink. There is no need to move to another location since there is plenty to do all day in this truly cultural space. Each space in LCDC SEOUL boasts a different aura, leaving not one inch of dull space. The first floor cafe is inviting with its warm wood tones, and the space on the second floor mixes different materials of stainless steel, red bronze, and wood. You can feel the shifting moods of each space as you move up and down the spiral staircase that connects the entire building at its core.

The third floor, where several boutiques are clustered, is where the identity of LCDC(Le Conte Des Conte), meaning "story of stories", is best revealed. The long corridor on the third floor with doors facing each other on either side like a school hallway was inspired by the movie Monsters, Inc.. Similar to the way each door led to a different child’s world in the movie, you can walk through the long corridor and find a different brand behind each door. Here at LCDC SEOUL, the stories of people passing through build up to write a new story for Seongsu.

Address              10, Yeonmujang 17-gil, Seongdong-gu, Seoul

Operation Hours  Daily Hours by floor - 1F 11:00 ~ 21:00, 2F&3F 11:00 ~ 20:00, 4F 17:00 ~ 01:00

                         (3F store hours may vary by store)

From Underground to Above Ground, Connected Inside and Outside

#FigureandGround #Garosugil

The Sinsa-dong Garosu-gil(lit. tree-lined street) is the center of Korea's cultural trend, where alleyways that extend like tree branches from the main street intertwine with each other. At its heart, lines of large shops of big name brands are lined up on either side. In the connecting alleys of the garosu-gil, the atmosphere takes on a quality of its own, with one of them being the location of red brick houses standing tall, and among them, a particularly large building catches the eye, the location of Figure and Ground.

Figure and Ground is dressed in red brick, a material commonly used in architecture, but the exterior is wrapped in thin strips going around the building that exudes intense sophistication. It is even more meaningful in that it is a reconstruction of the original form of the 30-something-year-old building that once stood in its place. The strip of bricks surrounding the exterior creates the illusion that the building continuously rises upward. Behind this brick belt hides an exterior staircase that connects the inside and outside of each floor. Follow the brick road to the end and you will find a small garden on the roof. The rooftop garden overlooking the Sinsa-dong Garosu-gil offers a new attraction that is set apart from the view from the alley.

With a cafe and a boutique on the lower floors and a shared office on the upper floors coexisting in one building, Figure and Ground is buzzing on weekdays and weekends, day and night. All of its spaces are planned around a cylindrical column (cylinder space) in the center of the building. From the first basement floor up to the sixth floor, the circulation on all floors follow this brick pillar in a circle around the central space that penetrates the building.  In the cafe and boutique, you can experience a peculiar open space visually open through the curved glass windows along the pillars.

The central cylinder space with a diameter of 3.6 m and a depth of 24 m was originally an elevator shaft. In the building renovation, the elevator was moved to a different location, and a spiral staircase was newly installed in its place, creating a special sense of space. Sunlight enters the entire building through the skylight at the top of the column, reaching all the way to the underground space. The doorless arched windows on each floor allow warm sunlight to stream into every floor.

Address              53, Nonhyeon-ro 153-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul

Operation Hours  Ground level café, Conflict Store : Daily 11:00 ~ 22:00