The serpentine playscapes on the inclined hill
Iddeul Kindergarten is located in Suji, a satellite city of Seoul, around one hour’s drive away by car. The project site sits at the foot of rolling hills, facing a shallow valley to the north.
The kindergarten has to accommodate approximately 360 children, divided into 18 classes containing 20 children per class.
At the basement level, the architects placed a low, 23m x 48.5m rectangular concrete box; the rooms inside have diverse ceiling heights according to their needs.
The basement acts as both a physical footing and creates programmatic bonds with the rooms above, where 18 classrooms and rooms with other functions are arranged as a congregation of five volumes, of different sizes and with increasing heights. The building responds to the surrounding topography while retaining an urban image.
The basement contains two playrooms, a faculty room, a kitchen and two studios, with a big auditorium at the center in a generous layout.
The 18 classrooms above are arranged along a snaking corridor, in a way that provides a panoramic sequence of playscapes for the children on one side, and views of the surrounding landscape on the other.
As a consequence of the encounter between the basement, which is half immersed in the mountainside, and the precise geometric array of the five attached volumes, different types of outdoor spaces are created.
The architects used exposed concrete, with a finger print finish, for the basement; on the other hand, for the upstairs classrooms, reinforced concrete volumes were enveloped with cement bricks, intentionally showing their ‘wrap’.
One of these five volumes, which contains the entrance hall, is skinned in dark metal sheets.
Project: Iddeul Kindergarten / Location: Sanghyun-dong, Suji-gu, Youngin, South Korea / Architect: ISON ARCHITECTS (Jean Son) / Design Team: Seoghoon Jung / Site area: 2,503m² / Bldg. area: 495.135m² / Gross floor area: 2,939.798m² / Materials: cement brick, hold block, pine wood texture on exposed concrete / Project Year: 2014~2015 / Photographs: ©Jongho Kim
