Sunday Brunch HQ (2024 Beautiful Architecture Award)

Photo: ⓒ 텍스처 온 텍스처

Near the site, Teheran-ro is dense with high-rise office buildings, where workers fill the streets each day. Yet just one block inward, residences of various scales are clustered together, and local residents carry on with their own daily lives. The site is positioned where these two distinct streetscapes rapidly transition into each other. The goal was to create a building with a scale and expression suited to the alley behind the massive volumes and curtain-wall facades of the boulevard.

After 13 months of construction, the hoarding came down and Sunday Brunch HQ met its neighbors face to face. Questions followed: What is the building for? What does it look like inside? Why were perfectly good bricks split and laid that way? These were natural questions from people who would share the same alley for years, perhaps decades. The hope is that this new building will not be a blemish on the neighborhood's residential landscape—and that, little by little, building and neighbors will come to know each other and remain good neighbors for a long time.