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KPF Completes Bundang Doosan Tower, a New Gateway to Seoul

Comprising two towers connected by a 100-meter tall skybridge, the new building forms an iconic landmark on its prime site near the main tollgate to and from Seoul.

Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF) is pleased to announce the completion of Bundang Doosan Tower, the new headquarters for the Doosan Corporation. The 27-story tall tower’s clear and rational form contains 83,000 square meters of office, auditorium, and amenity space – including a daycare center for employees, fitness center, the Doosan History Museum, and a café that opens up to the landscaped roof terrace. The stacked, interconnected masses create a grand portal which becomes an identifiable visual marker from the adjacent Gyeongbu Expressway. When approached from the city, the portal serves as the main entry point to the building, leading tenants and visitors along a stone paved plaza into two split lobbies. This progression takes place underneath the skybridge, which creates a framed exterior room. The sculpted, interlocking volumes connect to create a lobby that breaks down the scale of the exterior masses and contrasts the building’s rigid form with soft materials and warm tones.

“The Bundang Doosan Tower represents the latest example of KPF’s work in Korea,” said James von Klemperer, KPF President and Design Principal. ‘The design strives for rational simplicity, while being highly expressive and impactful. By using office building masses to define a large rectangular void, the composition affords striking views from the highway. The architecture conveys qualities of solidity and strength, and by organizing itself around a central space, it also communicates the value of community.”

The massing of Bundang Doosan Tower offers space for occupiable roof gardens at the podium level, which provide landscaped areas for employees and visitors. The glass facades of the building allow plentiful daylight into the interior office spaces while limiting solar gain, particularly from the west, through a series of vertical and horizontal exterior shading devices. Designed as a series of regular, repeating fins, the devices mitigate the glare from nearby buildings without obscuring the views of the surrounding cityscape from the interior. As the modern gateway to Seoul, the design of the fins reinterprets traditional materiality. Crafted in granite and with a chiseled finish at their edges for an added level of texture, the fins serve as an aesthetic transition between the rocky landscape and the building’s glass façade. The grain of shading elements follows the orientation of the building masses, enhancing the sense of directionality and movement of the traffic on the expressway.

The Bundang Doosan Tower provides three types of office spaces throughout the building. The base mass offers 2,500-square-meter floor plates with deep spans varying from 15 to 22 meters. The two towers house a boutique office of 1,500 square meters in each plan, with several floors in the south tower connected by an internal stair that serves as a vertical communication corridor. The skybridge section offers four extra-large floors at 4,000 square meters each which are connected by a four-story, sky lit atrium with a green feature wall that infuses the space with a connection to nature. The upper zone of the skybridge includes the most open and interactive office space, featuring casual gathering and meeting areas, presentation equipment, and fully operable skylight shading. Its open floorplan, with flexible layouts to foster innovation through collaboration, runs parallel to the expressway providing panoramic views to the dynamic context. In order to construct the skybridge, the 1,500-ton structure was preassembled on site at ground level and then lifted into place over the course of 24 hours.

The Bundang Doosan Tower expands KPF’s portfolio in Korea, which includes Seoul’s highly prominent Lotte World Tower, a 555-meter-tall mixed-use tower that stands as a beautiful monument on the city skyline. The tower anchors the Lotte World Mall, a unique place for gathering that prioritizes fluidity of circulation throughout the complex, and is comprised of retail and entertainment spaces, including the award-winning Lotte Concert Hall.

The project also builds on KPF’s reputation for high-design headquarters buildings for significant corporations around the world, including the recently unveiled T. Rowe Price Headquarters in Baltimore, a pedestrian-scaled building that links the waterfront with a nearby park; Unilever London Headquarters, which transforms a historic structure to put the working practices of employees at the heart of the design; and the Warner Media Headquarters at 30 Hudson Yards, which marks the development on the New York City skyline as the third tallest office tower in the city.

To read the full press release, please click here.