Reports: Permeable Building Envelope of Stainless-steel Rings
- Roland Pawlitschko
Since it was established 30 years ago, Kukje Gallery has become one of Seoul’s most important exhibition venues for South Korean and international art. In April 2012 their third gallery building in Sogyeok-dong – a neighbourhood with low-slung homes, cafés and boutiques north of the central business district – opened. In accordance with the art campus’s master plan, the architects placed the new six-metre-high cube next to the two existing galleries. Behind its concrete shell is an art space, lit from above, for exhibitions, performances and events. To retain the clear geometry of this White Cube inside the gallery, parts of the building were added to the four outer walls: a vestibule, an elevator, a building-services enclosure, and two stairs. A curved stair connects the art space to the two lower floors, where the lecture space, administration, retail space and storage are located. An exterior steel stair leads to the unsheltered roof terrace. Because the building form that resulted appeared too rigid to them, the architects developed a second skin that was to surround the building like fog. They built a number of models experimenting with elastic fabric and arrived at a custom-tailored, chain-mail skin of stainless-steel rings that spans from the roofline to the ground and is entirely wrinkle-free. The result is a building at once orthogonal and amorphous that, owing to its hazy exterior, retreats into the background, and in this manner is well integrated in the heterogeneous surroundings. The 510 000 interlocking rings were first cut out of 3.5 mm thick wire coils and then manually connected, welded together and smoothened. The two main challenges were first, to develop a computer model to define the precise position of each ring (this task was taken on by the architects and Front, an engineering firm specialising in facades); and second, to ensure that the mesh does not sag. Following a number of tests, the fifteen separate segments – fabricated by craftsmen in China and delivered to Seoul – were installed with great precision, and their seams are not visible. Rigid points of connection located in the ground and above the glazing and spring-loaded connections at the parapet guarantee the chain mail’s tight fit.
