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PLEX
Design: Saul Kim
Client: PLEX
April 2025 Daegu, South Korea
This project proposes a mixed-use building in central Daegu, developed to accommodate both public and private functions across three levels. The client’s brief called for an office space on the top floor for their operations, while dedicating the ground and second floors to a café and flexible community programs. Additionally, the design needed to anticipate future expansion to the north, as the client planned to acquire adjacent parcels of land for extended landscape or development.
Responding to this unique condition, the building takes the form of a series of thin, stacked boxes, gently shifted to follow the irregular geometry of the site—bent slightly at its midpoint. The volume is pulled toward the western edge, adjacent to existing buildings, leaving a deliberate gap on the east side. This linear void forms a landscaped path that connects the southern entrance to the future northern site, aligning with a small public park across the road and allowing the architecture to open itself to the city.
Each box is slightly offset from the one below, producing subtle overhangs and setbacks. This shifting creates opportunities for natural light penetration and visual connectivity across levels, while maintaining a singular, continuous wall that anchors the building along its spine. The resulting triangular "leftover" spaces at the intersections become efficient zones for the building's service core—circulation, mechanical, and storage—freeing the main areas into flexible, uninterrupted rectangles suited for a range of uses.
The floor plans reveal two dominant axes of ruled geometry that generate the building’s formal logic. These axes sometimes converge to create overlaps and sometimes diverge to carve out voids, producing unique spatial relationships and vertical light shafts. These moves not only articulate the massing but also enhance the building's environmental performance and public character. The architecture expresses a quiet tension—simultaneously contextual and independent, simple in form yet complex in spatial logic.
Proposal for PLEX
Ground Floor Plan
Second Floor Plan
Third Floor Plan
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