The DDP has been designed as a cultural hub at the centre of one of the busiest and most historic districts of the city. It is a place for people of all ages; a catalyst for the instigation and exchange of ideas and a place for new technologies and media to be explored - presenting an ever-changing menu of exhibitions and events that feeds the cultural vitality of the city.

The DDP is an architectural landscape that revolves around the ancient city wall and newly discovered cultural artefacts which form the central element of the composition linking the park and plaza together. The fluid design encourages the greatest degree of interaction between the park and the people of Seoul. 

The new DDP park is a place for leisure, relaxation and refuge - a green oasis within the busy urban surroundings of Dongdaemun. The design integrates the park and plaza seamlessly as one, blurring the boundary between architecture and nature in a continuous, fluid landscape that connects the city, park and architecture together. Voids and inflections in the park’s surface give visitors glimpses into the innovative world of design below, making the DDP an important link between the city’s contemporary culture, emerging nature and history.

The DDP design is the very specific result of how the context, local culture, programmatic requirements and innovative engineering come together - allowing the architecture, city and landscape to seamlessly combine in both form and spatial experience.

The park is accessible to everyone, with folds and inflections in its surface that welcome and direct visitors through different levels of the interior. The design blurs the boundaries between architecture and urban landscape, solid and void, interior and exterior. It is an architectural landscape where concepts of spatial flow are made real – creating a whole new kind of civic space for the city.

The 86,574 square meter DDP comprises a design museum, library and educational facilities, whilst the 30,000 square meter park reinterprets the celebrated spatial concepts of traditional Korean garden design: layering, horizontality, blurring the relationship between the interior and the exterior – with no single feature dominating the perspective. This approach is further informed by historic local painting traditions that depict grand visions of the ever-changing aspects of nature.