Wellness Center for the Elderly and Disabled Unjeong Danurim

Situation Paju, Corea del Sur

Area 12.560 m2 m²

Year 2019 - En construcción

Architects
Sol89. María González & Juanjo López de la Cruz + Woodrock Architects

Lead coordinating architect
Jongjin Lee

Collaborators
Cristobal Galocha, Elena González, Álvaro Valverde, María Luisa Benítez, architects; Treceuve Render, infographics

Client
Paju City Government

Photography
Sol89

In the scattered fabric where we find ourselves, the existing peripheral park is the major urban reference, where buildings are situated as isolated pavilions. We understand that the park is the significant public reference; therefore, the building should emerge in relation to it. We choose a fragmented implementation that acknowledges the program’s division into two (one for elderly users and another for people with reduced mobility) and allows the park to traverse the project, connecting to it through a madang, a type of traditional Korean courtyard with a public vocation. Simultaneously, we endow the proposal with compactness to confer a unified image capable of providing identity to this generic and yet unconsolidated area of the city.

We opt for a horizontal configuration that reduces vertical journeys for people with reduced mobility, whether due to age or disability. This approach also achieves a friendlier scale and ensures that the madang is a sunny place throughout the year, defining and refining the park’s broad and collective space. It establishes all types of transparencies and multiple building accesses, increasing the awareness of public and shared space.

From the covered porches open to the madang, there is access to the two centers, with direct entry to the auditoriums and the day center. The porches also independently lead to the two large dining rooms. Through the gentle ramp that crosses the madang, we can directly access the gyms, billiards, and table tennis on the first floor. In section, we propose occupying the building from the most public at the bottom to the most private at the top, from the dining rooms on the first floor to the offices on the third floor. The three large voids, the two auditoriums, and the madang, structure and orient the project as the three significant scenographic spaces where collective acts are celebrated and have direct access.

The entire intervention is resolved with an isotropic grid of 7.8 x 7.8 meters of concrete pillars. From this base module, the concrete boxes of the auditoriums and the central service cores are introduced. This grid, allowing flexible and alternative configurations that could change over time, is clad with a facade composed of a series of 125 cm wide modules. Each module houses the aluminum and glass window frames, fixed or operable depending on the use, and externally presents a curved perforated aluminum sheet with varying degrees of perforation depending on the use and orientation. It homogenizes the exterior appearance, providing unity to the whole without veiling the visions from inside to outside.

The result is a porous building that lets the park pass through to house a public space that qualifies the harsh environment where it is located and offers itself kindly to its inhabitants.

Arquitectura comparada: Centro del Bienestar en Paju vs. Convento de San Jerónimo en Sevilla