Ewha Womans University Campus Center

Dominique Perrault blends built and natural environments in a new campus center for the growing student body of Seoul’s Ewha Womans University.

By Robert Ivy, FAIA

Blurring the line between construction and topography, French architect Dominique Perrault’s campus center for Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea’s trendy Sinchon district is seamlessly integrated into the sloping hillside it intersects. At the crux of the prestigious campus, this multitiered, multifunctional hive of activity anchors the site and creates a landscape of its own.

The unique site is particularly fitting for the school, which was founded by American Methodist missionary Mary F. Scranton in 1886 and named Ewha (pear blossom in Sino-Korean) by the emperor in 1887 for the abundance of delicate flora at its original location in the city’s central Chong-dong area. Beyond poetic metaphor, however, necessity was the mother of this striking structural invention.

Primarily, the existing gated campus of traditional Collegiate Gothic structures, designed in the 1930s by W.M. Vories, the eponymous, Japan-based architectural design firm of Kansas-born William Merrell Vories, was becoming increasingly inadequate. Ewha had risen in prominence and size to more than 20,000 students—reputedly the world’s largest private women’s university. Yet, while its international student body continued to grow, most domestic students were living at home, many with 2-hour commutes, and the campus lacked sufficient study space or places to gather for long days at school. For those who did remain on campus, weekends proved disconcertingly lonely and detached. Moreover, the addition of a notable building would communicate the university’s growing global connection.

Working with a task force, former university president Shin In-ryung established structural and logistical guidelines for the proposed facility. It would be embedded into the landscape, include bi-level parking and a commercial area on lower levels, and redefine access to the campus. It was also determined that the project would require a design by an established international architect. So in February 2004, invitations to compete for the project were sent to a select group of firms from which three finalists were chosen: Zaha Hadid, Foreign Office Architects (FOA), and Perrault.

Ultimately, the commission was awarded to Perrault for his scheme’s sensitivity to landscape. According to the architect, his brief was “to expand urban activities into the campus.” His solution was to rebuild the site’s original topography, a hill with a slope; introduce the new building into the “constructed” hillside; then cover the building with a park. The result is both heroic and naturalistic, depending on the viewer’s perspective.

Remarkably, little changed from Perrault’s original program. Crucial to his realization was the decision to bifurcate the concrete-framed structure, dividing it into seemingly cloned halves by an immense rift, or “valley”—a strong assertion of contemporary intervention into the landscape. Ramped from its intersection with the street, this passage, lined with granite pavers, descends into the sliced reconstructed hillside, allowing access to the buildings along its route. It then terminates at a grand stairway that not only climbs up into the campus at the opposite end but serves as an informal seating area or, as Perrault envisioned, an open-air amphitheater. Intended to be a link to the community and social space for students and visitors, this walkway maintains a controlled progression of height to width that points downward to the interior activities, and upward to the older buildings on the hills above.

Insulated glazed walls, supported by a polished, stainless-steel-clad aluminum framing system notable for its perpendicular vertical fins, provide light to the lowest interior levels and animate both indoor and oudoor spaces with human activity. Intermittent doorways, signified by bold graphic numerals, provide the simplest of alterations to the otherwise continuous curtain wall.

Surmounting the binary structure, a green roof partially conceals the large building footprints. At the outset, Perrault intended to plant trees in this overhead park, but the shallow depth of the soil would only permit grass and shrubs. Nonetheless, the constructed roofscape produces a natural effect with a stone path that meanders among plantings, artfully introduced mechanical elements (read chimneys), and stairs. It is difficult to understand if the park existed on the hillside, or if the hillside is entirely new. Indeed, the passageway can disappear from view, depending on where one stands on either side of the building, leaving only greenery merged with the campus landscape.

Perrault, a proponent of below-grade structures—with built projects like the French National Library in Paris and Velodrome and Olympic swimming pool in Berlin under his belt—feels there should be more research on the use of the earth, or landscape, as a viable building material like concrete or steel. “Usually nature is around the architecture,” he says, adding that he and fellow architects should be “thinking about another kind of relationship with nature and soil.”

Within this trompe l’oeil–like setting, one will find a battery of much-needed spaces—enough to constitute “a small city,” notes Yoonhie Lee, associate professor of the university’s department of architecture, and a member of the original competition committee instrumental in the center’s interior programming. No single programmatic element dominates, though the building tends to aggregate the noisier, more social activities on the lowest level, four levels beneath the roof. Like a commercial district, this level, B-4, contains a twinned-screen art cinema, coffee houses, a gymnasium, restaurant, theater, art exhibition space, commercial banks, and retail outlets.

The higher you ascend, the quieter it gets, because, explains Lee, while classes are held here, one of the center’s most important functions is to provide places for study. Formal, monitored librarylike spaces, with reserved carrels and desks, alternate with informal couches interspersed throughout, where students talk in small groups, review lessons, or simply socialize. A large, open staircase links upper and lower levels adjacent to the glazed curtain wall and seems to attract more student traffic on inclement days than the “valley” outside, which can seem daunting. While gravity-based drainage removes heavy monsoon rain, snowfall on the outer passage must be cleared by hand.

Of course, one benefit of building into a hillside is energy conservation. According to university sources, the thermal mass of the green roof and side walls sheltered by existing topography has resulted in a passive protection system that saves up to 25 percent of total energy costs as compared to conventional construction. Perrault also used a concrete core activation system, (aka in-floor HVAC made of piped heating and cooling under floor slabs) along with a “thermal labyrinth” system that optimizes air flow in the interstices between retaining walls and other structural elements to cool ambient air. And while the building’s interior could have been dark and dingy, Perrault and his collaborators inserted light wells down through to the lowest inhabited levels, a strategy augmented by the glazing.

In terms of budget, the simple system and material choices, such as exposed-concrete columns, helped to deliver the building on time and within the financial strictures of the university. Even fireproofing, often prohibitive in such large open spaces, doubled as decorative elements in the otherwise muted interiors.

Clearly, Ewha Womans University took a bold step specifying a scheme that goes not up, but down. No less dramatic or memorable than the towers dotting the Asian landscape, the campus center makes a strong statement of the institution’s commitment to the future, to its heritage, to its place in the environment, and to its students.

California Academy of Sciences

By Clifford A. Pearson

Renzo Piano calls his new building for the California Academy of Sciences a “soft machine.” “It sounds better in Italian, because machine brings to mind the process of making and Leonardo in his workshop,” he explains, pronouncing the Italian word macchina. The architect and his team at the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) conceived of the 410,000-square-foot project as a manifestation of the academy’s mission to study, store, and exhibit the wonders of natural science. “It’s a machine for preserving nature,” says Piano. Great idea. But this is a big machine, at a key location in Golden Gate Park, and it needs to engage a lot of different people: the 10-year-old kid looking for the live penguins, the 40-year-old ichthyologist working there, and the romantic couple sitting on a bench in the adjacent plaza, called the Music Concourse.

Part museum and part research-and-storage institute, the academy occupies the site of its predecessor—an 11-building complex erected piecemeal from 1916 to 1976 and damaged beyond repair by the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. It faces Herzog & de Meuron’s de Young Museum [record, November 2005, page 104] across the Music Concourse, creating a dialogue between equally famous foreign architects working on public buildings of equal scale. While Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron wrapped their museum in an array of copper panels (dimpled, bubbled, and flat), and Piano surrounded his with extremely clear, low-iron glass, both projects attach themselves to the park—the de Young with fingers of landscaped space entwined with gallery wings, and the academy with enormous, floor-to-ceiling views outside. The firms’ very different approaches to similar sets of issues makes this pairing one of the most fascinating in the country—on par with Kahn and Ando in Fort Worth. When asked about the academy’s relationship with the de Young, Piano says he didn’t think about it much. “This is what you get when you are yourself and they are themselves.”

Piano’s initial sketch for the academy shows a long, undulating roof in section: Where large programmatic elements sit, it rises up to accommodate them, and where less is needed, it dips down. “So it becomes organic,” states the architect. “At first, I wanted to do the roof as a wood structure, to build it like the keel of a boat,” he explains. In the end, though, it was made of steel, in part to limit the number of trees cut down. From the start of the project, Piano collaborated with Chong Partners (now Stantec), even bringing designers from the San Francisco firm to work in his Genoa office for certain periods.

Piano saw the roof as a metaphor for the entire project. “I saw it as topography,” he adds. “The idea was to cut a piece of the park, push it up 35 feet—to the height of the old buildings—and then put whatever was needed underneath.” From the beginning, he envisioned a green roof that would be an extension of the park and serve as a thermal buffer for the spaces below. “Twenty-first-century architecture must be about sustainability,” he asserts. “This isn’t a moralistic stance; it’s simply what architecture must be.”

For an institution devoted to the natural sciences, such an attitude was particularly important. The building, which received a LEED Platinum rating after it opened at the end of September, employs an impressive range of green strategies, including recycling 90 percent of the demolition waste from the old buildings; using recycled material for all of its structural steel; incorporating insulation made from recycled blue jeans; employing heat-recovery systems to capture and use heat generated by HVAC equipment; using radiant heating in floors; ensuring that 90 percent of regularly occupied space has access to daylight; naturally ventilating almost the entire building (see sidebar, page66); and reducing the need for potable water by using low-flow plumbing fixtures and reclaimed water from the City of San Francisco.

The green roof, which bulges to form seven hills, plays a critical role in the building’s sustainable-design performance—reducing storm-water runoff by 98 percent, providing thermal insulation, and creating a 2.5-acre habitat for 1.7 million native-Californian plants and all kinds of insects and birds. The undulating roof incorporates glass panels above part of a central piazza and small circular skylights set into the various “hills.” The skylights, which are controlled by an automated system, all open and close to naturally ventilate the spaces underneath. A solar canopy wrapping around the perimeter of the building contains more than 55,000 photovoltaic cells that can generate 213,000 kilowatt hours each year (at least 5 percent of the academy’s energy needs). According to Arup, which provided sustainability-consulting services, as well as structural and mechanical engineering, the building will consume 30 to 35 percent less energy than required by California’s already strict building code.

National Stadium of Sports Affairs Council

Toyo Ito raises the bar for sports facilities with his graceful, sustainable design for the National Stadium in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

By Naomi R. Pollock, AIA

In a fitting match of design and program, Toyo Ito performed a feat of architectural athleticism with his National Stadium of the Sports Affairs Council in Taiwan. Combining the grace of a ballet dancer with the strength of a body builder, its lithe, sinewy form encircles a playing field, while its brawny concrete and steel components do the heavy lifting. Located in Kaohsiung, a city of 1.5 million people 234 miles south of Taipei, the 40,000-seat arena (Ito’s first work in Taiwan) opened in time for the 2009 World Games, which took place from July 16 through 26.

Having teamed up with the Japanese design and construction company Takenaka Corporation plus architects Ricky Liu & Associates and Fu Tsu Construction Company, both of Taiwan, Ito won an international competition held in 2005. The objective of the clients, Taiwan’s National Council on Physical Fitness and Sports and the Kaohsiung Bureau of Public Works, was to erect a stadium with a 1,300-foot-long track and a soccer field that met the specifications of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association and the International Association of Athletics Federation while complying with local government guidelines for integrating green building technology.

In addition to satisfying these criteria, Ito’s goal was to revamp the typology’s closed, concentric parti by opening the arena to the landscape and loosening up its form. “Usually stadiums are very static and symmetrical, but this time we wanted to make a more fluid and dynamic shape,” explains Ito.

Located on the grounds of a former navy base north of downtown Kaohsiung, the stadium begins with a long “tail” that greets sports fans, who mostly approach from the subway station nearby. Containing ticket booths and concessions shops, this appendage starts out small in section but expands steadily as it ascends the ground’s gentle slope. When the land levels off, the tail merges with the arena’s top-heavy body: a soaring, C-shaped grandstand that whips around the field and terminates abruptly at the “head.”

Holding upper and lower seating areas (plus room for an additional 15,000 temporary chairs), the arena opens to an internal lawn on the south, and the main gate connects to a broad terrace fanning out in front. “You can stand outside and still sense what is happening on the field,” says Chih Hsun Su, deputy chief engineer in the Construction Office of the city’s Public Works Bureau. The stands’ energetic form is secured in place by a concrete base containing two partially underground levels, both below grade at the building perimeter but open to the sunken playing field in the middle. The upper basement contains parking, administrative offices, and VIP suites that open onto box seats; the lower basement has prep areas for the athletes and more parking.

As in many Ito-designed buildings, the stadium’s architecture and structure are essentially one. Since the arena has little need for full enclosure, a series of massive structural elements, each one clearly articulated and connected to the next, defines the building. The sequence begins with the piles and raft foundations. These support the basements’ reinforced-concrete slabs and walls, which provide lateral stability as well as vertical load distribution. Most of the downward force comes from the concrete saddles above. Interspersed with openings and aligned like vertebrae, these monumental arches create the stadium’s double-decker circulation spine. Their irregular forms—nine different types in the body of the building alone—were made of poured-in-place concrete, as were the shoulder-angled beams supporting the upper seat decks and the roof.

Bolted to the saddles and the beams are 159 cantilevered steel trusses. Arranged radially, they extend out over the seats and hold up the roof. Tying the trusses together, 32 oscillating spirals of steel pipe stand out as the exterior’s most distinctive feature. Composed from hollow pieces measuring 13 inches in diameter and 20 feet in length, the tubes were factory made to Ito’s 3D specifications. Once welded together on-site, the pipes take on an entirely new character. Crossing over and under the trusses, they imbue the entire stadium with a sense of movement.

In addition to their strong visual impact, the coiled steel members act as lateral bracing that holds the framework for the 229,314-square-foot roof. This intricate, scalelike surface shades the spectators with its 6,482 aluminum-framed glazed units. It is also a massive solar collector, as 4,482 of these sections contain pairs of 4-foot-square solar panels. Tempered glass plate of variable length mediates the energy-gathering units’ rigid flat shape and the stadium’s irregular, curved geometry.

“Connecting these 2D and 3D elements was extremely difficult,” says L.P. Lin of Fu Tsu Construction. In locations unsuitable for solar-energy collection, the glazing is made entirely of tempered glass. Rubber gaskets smooth out the roof’s plane, while narrow troughs (or gutters) gather rainwater and direct it to underground cisterns supplying the soccer field’s irrigation system.

The largest solar-energy-generating stadium in the world, the building produces 1.1 million kilowatt hours annually—many times more energy than it needs. As a result, the system funnels the excess directly to the Taiwan Power Company, eliminating the need for costly and space-consuming storage batteries. When the stadium hosts a major event, it simply buys back extra electricity for lights, air-conditioning, and twin JumboTron screens. Furthermore, according to Fu Tsu Construction, the solar panels are responsible for reducing the building’s CO2 emissions by as much as 660 tons annually.

Another beneficiary of the sun is the grass field. To ensure that the lawn gets its required daily exposure of 5½ hours, the stadium’s long axis tilts 15 degrees north-northwest. This orientation also keeps most of the bright rays out of the athletes’ eyes—an important consideration that could impact the outcome of the game. Of equal concern was the ability to control the wind. Because the stadium opens to the south, it is able to corral the strong gusts that buffet the site during Kaohsiung’s scorching summers. While the resulting natural ventilation maintains comfortable temperatures for spectators, breezes are likely to disturb play. To prevent such mishaps as the ball blowing around during a game, the architects embedded the field into the earth.

Visually, the verdant plain relates to the grass-covered slope inside the stadium as well as the grounds outside—a mixture of existing and newly planted trees. “We wanted to attract the public with a new urban park typology,” explains Ito.

Nevertheless, while landscaping mollifies its impact, the voluminous building hardly blends with the residential neighborhood around it. Yet no one seems to mind. On the contrary, Ito’s landmark has invigorated the area and is a big score for Kaohsiung.