The Outdoor Room Pavilion / salazarsequeromedina + Frank Barkow

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https://www.archdaily.com/1008360/the-outdoor-room-pavilion-salazarsequeromedina-plus-frank-barkow
© Yongjoon Choi

Text description provided by the architects. The Outdoor Room is a pavilion for the 4th Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, 2023, titled Land Architecture, Land Urbanism, and built in Songhyeon Green Plaza.

The pavilion is one among seven installations that have been designed by internationally renowned architects (including Pezo Von Elrichausen, Plastique Fantastique, Kimchi and Chips, and Riccardo Blumer), and are aiming to reclaim the Songhyeon Green Plaza as a central experiential node within the city of Seoul, inviting citizens to take partake in this edition of the biennale, held this fall 2023.

Designed in collaboration between the American-German architect Frank Barkow and the young practice salazarsequeromedina, it is an architectural device to sense land and city. The simplicity of the square structure aims to capture the complexity of the environmental and cultural history which endows great significance to the opening of its site to the public.

Once an ancient pine forest attached to a royal palace, in the second half of the 20th century Songhyong-dong was a representative site of American military occupation. The site was a void, enclosed by walls and isolated from the rapidly growing urban environment around it. As the walls come down and the park opens to the public, becoming available to the citizens of Seoul, it remains enclosed by the density of the city surrounding it.

Therefore, The Outdoor Room is a void within a void that frames the history of change for land and city. Its construction assembles materials that have been repurposed from another structure, the Faraway Pavilion, designed by the Seoul-based practice, Diagonal Thoughts.

The structure is composed of a frame of repurposed wooden elements and clad in corrugated steel. The lifecycle of these elements transcends the structure itself as they will carry on after the biennial closes and become adapted to a new site, in South Korea

Within the limits of its current form, visitors will discover a circular central garden of native plants and a steel-made chimney that reverberates with the wind. The Outdoor Room aims to be a pavilion generating a space that will feel domestic and familiar, though strangely abstract.

It will be a place of arrival because of its location next to the main entrance of the Songhyong-dong, visible from the entire neighborhood, and a place to stay for a while and sense the sky, the backdrop of mountains characteristic of the Seoul landscape, and the tops towering surrounding buildings.

This project was made possible by the sponsorship of the Spanish Embassy in Seoul, as well as a PICE mobility Grant awarded by AC/E Accion Cultural de España, Spanish Ministry of Culture.