The Pyeongchang-dong Art Complex is located on a collection of very uniquely shaped adjacent and semi-adjacent lots within the semi wooded foothills outside Seoul. The project at its heart is a hands-on creative learning, research and artistic experience center for the local community to engage in. A kind of creative oriented community center, a place where one can become actively engaged with the artistic process as well as a place to relax, observe and absorb the artistic spirit. The project program contains a collection of diverse, creative, and investigative uses that provide rich opportunities for the exchange of ideas; as such, the organization of the project is based on this premise. Set into the landscape like a low set hillside monastery that blends into the existing urban fabric with a network of walking paths that reach out in various directions providing visual and pedestrian connections into the existing surrounding residential context.

The projects organizational layout is designed to encouraged and enhance the day to day exchange of ideas through its network of interconnecting multi-leveled pedestrian pathways and plazas. Together they weave the various project sites and building programs together into a village of co-mingled uses and encourage creative cross-pollination of ideas between its users. Visitors, Scholars, Artists, Students, and local residents passing through all become creative inhabitants of the site. As they make their way between the various buildings and daily activities their paths haphazardly cross and one time strangers start to become familiar faces, conversations ignite and musical performances start influencing the direction of literary research and so on & so forth. The project environment becomes a fertile ground for new ideas. The buildings themselves each take on a unique formal shape, driven by the intersection of internal and external programmatic needs, local community connectivity as well as responding to various site and environmental factors. Through their adjacency an intimate outdoor street is created connecting the different uses along a north – south axis. Three main structures (Main Entry Bldg., Gallery and Auditorium) are crowned with distinctive barrel roofs reminiscent of exaggerated traditional clay tiles. They visually mark the main points of a tirade that define the project organizationally framing either end of a main central pedestrian street accumulating in a large public plaza that overlooks the Pyeongchangmunhwa-ro street below.

Overall the project becomes a multilevel urbanistic landscape village, merged into the existing natural hillside and surrounding rural fabric and formed by various axial pathways that linking the site visually and physically to the larger local community.