The Imprint of a Paradise City
In Seoul, the Paradise City welcome its guests in two new stunning windowless buildings by MVRDV.
Close to the Incheon airport of the Korean capital, an entertainment and hotel complex dubbed The Paradise City has a total of six buildings including a casino, two hotels, an art collection (including artworks by Damian Hirst, Yayoi Kusama, Georg Baselitz, Subodh Gupta and more) with an art garden.
The Imprint by Rotterdam-based MVRDV is the latest addition to Paradise City, an entertainment and hotel complex comprised of 6 buildings located a kilometre away from Incheon, South Korea’s largest airport, and consists of a nightclub and an indoor theme park. MVRDV designed two simple volumes onto which they projected the facades of the neighbouring buildings, "imprinting" them in the form of relief patterns.
One building is a night club and the other an indoor theme park. The architects draped the buildings and worked on the relief patterns of the facades. They are made up of 3,869 unique panels, created out of glass-fibre reinforced concrete. Once installed, the panels were painted white in order to emphasize the reliefs, thereby transforming the two buildings into sculptural volumes of abstract art.
"Reflection and theatricality are therefore combined. With our design, after the nightly escapades, a zen-like silence follows during the day, providing an almost literally reflective situation for the after parties. Giorgio de Chirico would have liked to paint it, I think." said Winy Maas, co-founder of MVRDV.
The eye-catching effect is most probably the lifted entrances. The Club entrance is painted in gold and had been designed to be visible to passengers landing at the Incheon Airport.
Pictures courtesy of Ossip van Duivenbode.
