Tall & Urban News

Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates has announced the completion of Bundang Doosan Tower, the new headquarters for the Doosan Corporation. The 27-story tall tower's clear and rational form contains 83,000 square meters of office, auditorium,  and amenity space – including a daycare center for employees, fitness center, the Doosan History Museum, and a café that opens up to the landscaped roof  terrace. The stacked, interconnected masses create a grand portal, which becomes an identifiable visual marker from the adjacent Gyeongbu Expressway. When approached from the city, the portal serves as  the main  entry point  to the building, leading tenants and visitors along a stone-paved plaza into two split lobbies. This progression takes place underneath the skybridge, which creates a framed exterior room. The sculpted, interlocking volumes connect to create a lobby that breaks down the scale of  the exterior masses  and contrasts the building’s rigid form with soft materials and warm tones. “The Bundang Doosan Tower represents the latest example of KPF’s  work in Korea,” said James von Klemperer, KPF President and Design Principal.  

“The design strives for rational simplicity, while being highly expressive and impactful. By using office building masses to define a  large rectangular void,  the composition  affords  striking  views from the highway. The architecture conveys qualities of solidity and strength, and by organizing itself around a central space, it also communicates the value of community.” The massing of Bundang Doosan Tower offers space for occupiable roof  gardens  at the podium level, which provide landscaped areas  for employees and visitors. The glass façade of the building allow plentiful daylight into the interior office spaces while limiting solar gain, particularly from the west, through a series of vertical and horizontal exterior shading devices. Designed as a series of regular, repeating fins, the devices mitigate the glare from nearby buildings without obscuring the views of the surrounding cityscape from the interior.

As the modern gateway to Seoul, the design of the fins reinterprets traditional materiality. Crafted in granite and with a chiseled finish at  their edges for an  added level  of  texture, the fins serve as an aesthetic  transition between the rocky landscape  and the building’s glass façade. The grain of shading  elements  follows the  orientation  of  the  building masses, enhancing the sense  of directionality  and movement  of the  traffic  on  the  expressway. The  Bundang  Doosan Tower  provides three  types of office  spaces  throughout  the  building.  The base mass offers 2,500-square-meter floor plates with deep spans  varying  from  15  to 22 meters. The two towers house a boutique  office of 1,500  square meters in each  plan, with several floors  in the  south  tower connected  by  an  internal stair that serves as  a  vertical communication corridor.  The skybridge section offers four extra-large floors at 4,000 square meters  each which  are  connected by a four-story,  sky lit atrium with a green  feature wall that infuses the space with a connection to nature.

The upper zone of the skybridge includes the most open and interactive office space, featuring casual gathering  and  meeting areas,  presentation  equipment,  and  fully operable skylight shading. Its open floor plan, with flexible layouts to foster innovation through collaboration, runs parallel to the expressway providing panoramic views to the dynamic context. In order  to construct the  skybridge, the 1,500-ton (1,360-tonne) structure was preassembled on site at ground level and then lifted into place over the course of 24 hours. The Bundang Doosan Tower expands KPF’s portfolio in Korea, which includes Seoul’s highly prominent Lotte World Tower, a 555-meter-tall mixed-use tower that stands as a beautiful monument on the city skyline. The tower anchors the Lotte World Mall,  a unique  place  for gathering that prioritizes  fluidity of circulation throughout the complex, and is comprised of retail and entertainment spaces, including  the award-winning Lotte Concert Hall. The project also builds on KPF’s reputation for high-design headquarters  buildings for significant corporations around the  world, including the recently unveiled T. Rowe Price Headquarters  in  Baltimore, a pedestrian-scaled building that links the waterfront with a nearby park; Unilever London Headquarters, which transforms a historic structure to put the working practices of employees at the heart of  the design; and the Warner Media Headquarters at 30 Hudson Yards, which marks the development on the New York City skyline as the third tallest office tower in the city.   

For more on this story, go to Kohn Pedersen Fox.