The multi-family residential building, commonly known as “villa”, is a well spread typology in the cities of South Korea. Despite the large quantities of these residential buildings, arguably is not the preferable option for living in the city. The legal preconditions to design these type of buildings gives little space for innovation or typological variation in consequence creating a continuous urban magma of impersonalized buildings with a constant solution to massing, materiality and programmatic organization.
For all these reasons, designing yet another multi-family residence in Yeoksam-dong was an opportunity to find small design solutions that could provide certain level of newness to the restricted building typology. Firstly, the massing of the building, obtained as a consequence of strict application of the shadow-related code, is manipulated in order to increase the complexity of the volume. Two balconies are inserted in the north-west corner of the building, at 2F and 3F. By inserting the balconies in perpendicular direction to each other, the overall mass of the building is enriched.
