DDP Content Thirst: Reorganization as a Lifestyle Culture Platform and Global Design Hub
Vertical Garden Apartments, Visiting Mixed-Use Residential and Commercial Facilities… Promoting K-Architecture Culture Support Plans
(Milan=Yonhap News) Reporter Jeong Soo-yeon – “We created a great design hardware with Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP), but feel there’s much lacking internally in terms of software. We look forward to collaborating with the ADI Design Museum to develop further.”
On the 5th (local time), during his visit to the ‘ADI Design Museum’ in Milan, Italy, Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon expressed that although exhibitions at DDP are gaining reputation, there is always a thirst due to a lack of diverse content, emphasizing the importance of strengthening content through exchange and cooperation.
Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon, who is on a business trip to Italy, visited the design innovation scenes in downtown Milan from the 4th to the 5th, seeking ways to enhance the value of ‘Design Seoul.’
The ADI Design Museum, a place where a tram depot constructed in the 1930s was transformed into an art museum, offers a glimpse into the past and present of industrial design.
It showcases 350 works that have won Italy’s most prestigious industrial design award, ‘Golden Compass Award.’ Last April, it signed a design exchange partnership agreement with the Seoul Design Foundation.
This meeting marked the first official encounter since the partnership agreement, where Mayor Oh discussed ways to develop the Seoul Design Awards being prepared by the city.
Seoul plans to expand and develop DDP not simply as an exhibition center but as a lifestyle culture platform that connects to citizens’ everyday lives, aiming to transform DDP into a global design hub encompassing the entire design industry.
On the same day, Mayor Oh also visited ‘CityLife,’ a complex residential and commercial facility.
The place reimagined an exhibition hall site into residential, commercial, cultural, and business spaces, receiving praise for creating a sophisticated urban landscape with high-rise buildings harmoniously placed amidst a large green area in the heart of the city. Renowned architects such as Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind were involved, making it famous.
Following that, Mayor Oh visited ‘Grande Brera,’ a complex cultural space integrating a museum, library, and garden, to convey the excellence of Seoul’s position as an origin of arts and culture.
At the venue, Pierluigi Ricordi, the director managing the Italian music archive (Ricordi Archive), expressed a desire to hold related exhibitions in Seoul.
Earlier, on the 4th, Mayor Oh visited the ‘Porta Nuova’ district, recognized as a leading example of urban innovation in Milan.
After redeveloping an obsolete railway network underground, this area was reborn as an eco-friendly cutting-edge urban space and now serves as a new economic and cultural center for Milan.
The district features 111-meter-high residential buildings with balcony vegetation layers, mimicking a forest-like environment even at high elevations. Known as an upscale apartment, a 40-pyeong unit sells for 2.7 billion won.
Seoul is also undertaking projects to underground a total of 67.6 kilometers of above-ground railways crossing the city. The 1.22 million square meters of ground space thus acquired will be developed into large green parks like Yeontral Park, and the 171.5 square meters of historical land will undergo complex development with office, commercial, and cultural facilities.
Additionally, a large-scale project is underway to develop the Yongsan International Business District as a three-dimensional complex vertical city on the approximately 460,000 square meters Yongsan Railroad Depot site.
Mayor Oh stressed that design in urban spaces is of utmost importance and remarked that design is an investment in the present for the future.
He also visited ‘Portello Park,’ a space reborn as a garden-shaped park from an old automobile factory site, witnessing how former industrial facilities were transformed into emotional relaxation spaces.
Meanwhile, the city plans to establish the Seoul International Urban Space Design Award to highlight and recognize the value of global urban spatial innovation examples like the Porta Nuova case.
During his visit to Milan’s architectural and design sites, Mayor Oh lent support to the ‘K-Architecture Culture Comprehensive Support Plan’ announced just before his trip.
The K-Architecture Culture Comprehensive Support Plan aims to discover and nurture talented emerging architects by expanding their opportunities to participate in domestic large-scale projects. It also involves establishing an international urban space design award (tentatively named) to promote Seoul’s stature as a leading city in global architectural culture.