2nd Sejong Center for Performing Arts, Seoul, South Korea.

The concept for the 2nd Sejong Center for Performing Arts, designed by ACDF Architecture in collaboration with WAA Landscape Architects, envisions an urban bridge linking Yeouido Park to Hangang Park. Inspired by the mountainous backdrop of Seoul, the building rises from the ground like a lifted veil, merging monumental presence with graceful fluidity. Its surface hosts a nourishing forest, transforming the architecture into a fertile social ecosystem. Inside, pre-function halls are bathed in light filtered through layered plantings, creating a soft and immersive atmosphere. More than a cultural facility, the building becomes a mediation between city, nature, and community.

Details

As part of this international competition, the concept for the 2nd Sejong Center for Performing Arts, designed by ACDF Architecture in collaboration with WAA Landscape Architects, proposes an ambitious reconfiguration of Yeouido by weaving an organic connection between Yeouido Park and Hangang Park. The intervention takes shape through the lifting of the vegetated ground plane which, by translation, generates a built veil. This gesture gives rise to a bridge-building, linking the island’s central park to the riverfront park along the Han, while positioning Yeouido as a new cultural heart of the capital.

The resulting veil adopts a fluid morphology, its undulating lines recalling the distant mountain ridges that form Seoul’s natural backdrop. This resonance imbues the project with formal suppleness and discreet elegance, where monumentality is expressed not through rigidity but through continuity with the landscape. Atop this lifted surface, the creation of a nourishing forest transforms the architecture into a fertile ecosystem, extending the site’s vocation as a place of sociability, learning, and sharing.

Inside, the pre-function halls of the various performance spaces embody the same desire to bring nature into the core of the architectural experience. These transitional areas offer an atmosphere of calm and softness, where natural light is subtly modulated by a system of superimposed planting trays. The carefully calibrated interstices between these layers allow rays of light to penetrate, structuring the interiors with a gradient that moves from brightness to shadow. This landscape-architectural device generates a unique atmospheric materiality: light, filtered through the density of vegetation, becomes a generator of ambiance and comfort, turning moments of waiting into architectural experiences in themselves.

In this way, the 2nd Sejong Center for Performing Arts transcends the function of a cultural facility to become an inhabited mediation between the urban energy of Seoul and the fluidity of the Han River, between the horizontality of the ground and the verticality of the mountains. Through its form, its materiality, and its dialogue with the landscape, it becomes a living bridge, affirming Yeouido as a cultural territory rooted in time, nature, and community.