Dongdaemun Design Plaza & Park

A structure that could hold exhibition halls, a design museum, a market, an education center, and vast underground event space, all beneath a single unified form, while somehow also honoring the archeological remains of the old fortress wall and stadium foundations that excavation had already begun to uncover beneath the site.

Hadid's winning proposal, which she named the Dongdaemun Design Plaza, answered this near-impossible brief with an idea so large in scale that some members of the jury reportedly wondered, in private, whether it could be built at all.

She envisioned a building with no distinguishable front or back, no single dominant façade, but instead a continuous undulating landscape of curved metal panels, more than forty-five thousand of them in the final construction, each one individually shaped by computer-controlled milling machines and no two of them precisely alike, draped over the site like a second topography laid across the first.

The building would not rise so much as roll, its lowest points meeting the street almost at grade, its highest points swelling upward into galleries and auditoria so that the entire structure read, from above, less like architecture in the traditional sense than like an artificial landform that had simply always been there, waiting beneath the market stalls for the city to excavate it.

And Hadid's insistence on preserving the purity of the form, refusing to allow visible ductwork, refusing flat patches that would break the continuity of a curved ceiling, meant that solutions had to be found rather than compromises accepted.

It was, in the recollection of one engineer who worked closely with her office during this period, less like building a building and more like solving an enormous three-dimensional puzzle in which the picture on the box had been drawn by someone who did not believe in straight edges.

The Dongdaemun Design Plaza opens to the public in March of twenty fourteen.

Its full, sprawling form finally visible without scaffolding for the first time.

There are also a lot of wholesale goods.

There's also the famous Dongdaemun Design Plaza, the DDP, which looks like a giant deflated beach spaceship.

They tend to have some cool exhibits inside.

Seoul Fashion Week occurs there.

And the best part, it's free! I love that part.

If giant buildings are more your thing, so like DDP is turning the famous curved facade of Dongdaemun Design Plaza into one enormous screen filled with light, video, and music.

And for the first time, there will be live performances as well.

So imagine going to see some cool digital art and suddenly realizing, I'm at a concert! And meanwhile, the Han River is also extending their hours for shade tents until 10 p.m.