Busan appears as a thick crust of urban inhabitation interspearsed with an archipelago of vegetal uplifts with infrastructural zones of subduction... out of this urban and vegetal jungle rises the Opera House from the harbor. In contrast to the conventional opera house that is surrounded/ encircled/ entombed by a horizontal proliferation of support spaces, Busan is conceived as a 3-dimensional dispersed stack of support spaces cascading along the exterior of the performance halls. This new typology sponsors convival public mixing between inside and outside while providing/ performing/ affording natural cooling, ventilation and shade. The internal relationships between program structurally, socially and mechanically cascade and interact, collating into a series of public hanging gardens. This tensegrity structure is caped in a vegetal wrapper that shades in the summer, while passively heats in the winter. © 2011 NOA + AbCT: Andrew Heid, Hyoeun Kim, Christopher Purpura, Janghee Yoo.