“Spring! It’s spring!”
This was what we hoped at the beginning of this project the first visitors of the boutique hotel BomBom would call it. (‘Bom’ is the English transliteration of a Korean word which means the season of ‘spring.’)
Architecture as a means of communication
People use various codes as a means of intercommunication or to embed information. The architect believes architecture can be a means of communication and the container of information.
For travelers, the hotel is not only an accommodation but also an architectural place where they can share information. In this sense, we inserted the codes of ‘봄 (bom)’ and ‘spring’ into the facade image of the hotel. The code on the facade is not just to assume the function of architecture with simple fenestration, but also to serve as a design element that controls the neighboring detrimental scenes, thereby making the lively image of Hotel BomBom flow in and out of windows with light penetrating through them.
BomBom as a shelter for travelers
A tourist city where the ice sports game of the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics will be held, Gangneung is a place that expects a new and transformative trend to be seen. The site is a part of the commercial area in Sol-ol Residential District, where accommodations and entertainment facilities are mixed up. The original site was a fallow land which seemed to wait for the buildings with similar characters to come up. This building seems to have a significance in its same functioning as accommodation but with a completely different image. We wanted to impart a sense that spring has come to everyone who sees BomBom.
BomBom provides low stone fences and benches under roadside trees and the cafe on the 2nd floor where the hotel guests can have breakfast in the morning and communicating and sharing travel information in the evening. The standard rooms are on the 3rd and 4th floors, while the duplex suite rooms are on the 5th and 6th floors each of which has an exclusive terrace open to the outside in the urban center, serving as an open but also private space for rest.
Materiality and architecture
The old bricks giving off the sense of warmth seemed to be the most appropriate for the image of BomBom. Amongst many kinds of bricks, I intended to choose the ones which express a bright sense of spring, thus using the antique bricks that can embrace the reminiscence of travelers. The brickwork was built in three ways: the stairways and the corner window at the ground-floor front were made with cavity wall masonry, so as to flow the light from inside BomBom toward the urban nightscape; the exposed antique brickwork outside the east and south balconies on the 2nd floor becomes both exterior and interior materials, serving to transfer the external image into the inside; the upper vertical mass was made with protruding brickwork in order to emphasize the sense of massing and the unique texture of bricks.
Photographs by Yoon, Joonhwan
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