Calmness Toilet / METAA

Architects: METAA
Location: Incheon, South Korea
Architects In Charge: Woo Euijung, young-b kim
Landscape Design : Gawon
Area: 99.0 sqm
Project Year: 2014
Photographs: Park Chan Bae

From the architect. Urban park in the new town.

Cheongna District is in the process of organizing the frame of the new town in the site, where reclaimed the seashore. Due to this development plan, the existing region’s cultural, natural, regional and social conditions have rapidly changed, it has lost the region’s own identity and a dry urban landscape has been produced.

The urban park in Cheongna District is also approaching ordinary sectors by combining with new relations rather than the existing place context and focusing on the future relations and roles rather than the previous history.

Clam architecture as new place and background.

The site is a symbolic urban park situated in the center of the new town. We received a request for design when the park was in the midst of construction along with the surrounding apartments. The client asked us to position the toilet in the sector of the park with the concept of tradition and place one design in three places. As he asked, we planned a concept, which harmonize in three locations, doesn’t threaten the park’s environment and has a calm appearance as part of the background.

Invisible architecture. That is a considerably contradictory language and lets the background structuralize and define something. This can be an extremely passive architecture that doesn’t rely upon the power of architecture in architectural design.

Structural method of tradition and material.

For expressing calm and heavy mass, we emphasized the texture created by the depth and shadow of the louver and hid the vertically long skylight on the other side of the entrance in the louver for its completeness by only making the two entrances visible.

The two Japanese red cedar louvers that are 50 mm thick and 150 mm deep, are placed in a row, or they are freely arranged by being spaced two steps. Plus, the patterns of the OSB plywood and the shadow of the louver in the back of the louver create a calm atmosphere by expressing a monotonous, but deep elevation composition.