Daejeon Art Park
Bold Plan for Daejeon’s High Concept Music Performance Hall
An international success story
Aiming to refurbish an underutilized riverside, earlier this year the council of Daejeon in South Korea organized an architectural competition for the creation of masterplans. Four global and four local studios were invited to compete with their ideas on how this site could become a hypermodern hub of arts and culture.
Dubbed the ‘City of Creation’, our long-term partner, UNStudio’s plan revolved around three main pillars: the creation of a network of green urban spaces, the enhancement of mobility to connect Daejeon locally and globally, and the incorporation of impactful architecture to draw visitors in. Imagined with hybrid usage and modular design in mind, the concept of the buildings is an intriguing vision to behold.
Ultimately, UNStudio has managed to get into the shortlist for the second round of the competition. With their presentation of sustainable design, looping architecture, and interconnected spaces, they wowed the committee, securing the rights to design one of the crown jewels of the development, the Music Performance Hall, following a masterplan provided to them.
It’s an honor that we could take part in creating this winning presentation by producing a carefully constructed set of images and animations.
Presenting bold ideas the right way
Crafting architectural visualizations for such a grand pitch demands artistic expertise and flawless communication, both of which we were fortunate to have.
As UNStudio’s vision was thorough and all-encompassing, we were handed an explicit brief on subjects, moods, weather conditions, lighting suggestions, and even cameras in some cases, making our job simpler, yet very much inspiring. Working with a brief this strict is actually a blessing in disguise: since we know exactly what our client wants, we can focus our efforts on creating multiple iterations and experimenting with different themes to the same concept. The team cranked out a total of 27 images out of which 7 were finalized and used in the presentation.
Animation with an exact purpose
We create all of our animations to serve a goal whether it be to sell a real estate development to a target group or to convince a jury of the merits of a high-profile architectural submission. However, this project was a bit different as our task was to create 3 different short-format videos that could be used to underline the points the presenters made instead of bringing the flow of the presentation to a halt.
Unsurprisingly, the ideas for the videos for a given, yet we had room to experiment and finetune here as well to enhance the designer’s vision and make impossible concepts work. In one instance that meant devising a way to show all of a building in under 15 seconds using sped-up cameras and dynamic movement. In another, more elaborate one, we had to figure out how to make up for the shortcomings of a drone shooting. Since there are strict regulations for drone shooting in the area, the cameras could be as high up as we originally devised them to be – this posed a problem in both the image rendering and the animation production.
Advanced technique
To get around this issue, we used an advanced technique called matte projection that allowed our artists to use drone photos as textures on 3D elements. So instead of going with the initial plan of tracking our 3D buildings to the drone footage, we created the whole scene in 3D, using the reference photos to achieve a life-like quality that even surpassed our original idea for the video.
Throughout the project, we had to be pretty quick on our feet, honing our problem-solving and client communication skills in the process. We are beyond grateful that our collaborative effort yielded such results, and we are very much excited to see if UNStudio can wow the committee once again, getting the chance to realize the esteemed Music Hall straight out of Blade Runner.
