Daegyo Apartments Yeouido

Daegyo Apartments Yeouido is Heatherwick Studio's debut residential commission in South Korea, a full reconstruction of a 12-story, 576-unit apartment estate built in 1975 on Seoul's Yeouido island in Yeongdeungpo-gu, near Hangang Park along the Han River. Led by the Yeouido Daegyo Apartment Redevelopment Association with Samsung C&T as builder under its Raemian brand, the scheme tears down the existing blocks and replaces them with 912 homes across four sculptural towers of up to 49 stories, whose undulating rooflines echo the soft silhouettes of the mountains ringing Seoul, a deliberate rejection of the uniform slab typology that dominates Korean apartment districts. It is the first of Yeouido's roughly 15 aging-apartment reconstruction sites to secure management disposition authorization, and the first Korean reconstruction to entrust an overseas designer with the whole process from planning through completion. A sky garden and skywalks crown the scheme, while an unusually generous and permeable ground plane, open to residents and the public alike, is given over to a central green Heart Space, stepped gardens, sheltered walkways and sunken plazas maximizing views of the Han River. Community programming runs through the base with children's play areas, sports facilities and senior welfare services, and the design brief drew on Heatherwick's Humanise research surveying Seoul residents on their appetite for more distinctive, textured housing.