YG Headquarters | UNStudio

The South Korean music movement, also known as K-pop, is making significant inroads into the worldwide music industry( YG Headquarters ). South Korean acts are topping the charts and selling stadiums across Asia and the Americas. K-pop is taking the world by storm, with its finger on the cultural pulse and a social-media-savvy audience. In 2017, K-Pop producers YG Entertainment invited UNStudio to design their fresh new corporate building in Seoul, which has since become a pilgrimage site for fans hoping to get a peek of their latest stars.

The design of YG Headquarters building by UNStudio is influenced by YG Entertainment’s business and the music industry in general. The new building features office spaces, meeting rooms, and recording studios, which are thoughtfully structured to maximize the site and provide YG Entertainment employees with the most uplifting and exciting work atmosphere imaginable.

YG Headquarters’s Design Concept

The new headquarters are situated on the boundary of two quite distinct worlds. It borders a low-density housing area on one side and faces a busy network of highways and bridges on the other, overlooking a big green park. This disparity in positioning impacts the design, building orientation, and internal organization, as well as opening up views of the river from the interior workstations.

The new YG Headquarters is next to the well-known existing YG Headquarters, whose interior embraces a ‘black in black’ idea. The YG Headquarters interior takes a different approach, introducing a brightly lit area with various white tones and geometric lines. The interior organization of the YG Headquarters reflects the dual aspects of the surroundings through an interconnecting segmented idea for the functions.

This logic, combined with visual consistency in materials and geometry, results in a unique interior experience visually linked to the outside street level. At the same time, the roof floods the center atrium space with light. The seven office levels are oriented toward the park, ensuring that daylight is available on all working floors. The meeting and collaboration areas on the first four stories face an interior atrium, which acts as a communal space in the building’s heart. This space serves as a hub for the lower-level offices, recording studios, and users, workers, and visitors.

The atrium’s internal facade is broken with exposed capsule-like meeting spaces that can function as “working zones” or “resting zones.” These capsules allow for even more visual engagement throughout the atrium and office floors. The atrium on the ground floor houses a hidden garden and serves as a ‘living room‘ for visitors. Wayfinding is included in the interior design through a network of geometrical lines that guide visitors to the various zones in the building, improving traffic flow and creating a spatial hierarchy. The new HQ building’s protective shell manifests as a new “urban speaker.”It is intended to resemble a product rather than a building, with each design aspect serving a functional purpose.

The YG Headquarters’s exposed concrete facade is a distinctive feature that sets it apart from the new HQ. Despite this, the new YG Headquarters maintains the same height, number of floors, and functions as the previous structure while creating a fresh and unique organization that takes advantage of its strategic location between the city and the park. The building’s massing expresses this duality by connecting the protective shell-like outer facade to a more human-scale interior materiality. The building’s specific zones are clearly defined within the protective outer shell, corresponding to the building’s urban placement and established based on their particular use and interaction with the surrounding environment.

Fully glazed portions face the park, and the core zone on this side of the structure features balconies. These provide outside places for users during work breaks while shading the below levels. BIPV solar cells are also installed on the roof and the south-facing facade. Semi-glazed zones are designated in the transition to the entirely opaque facade.

Dynamic lines are used to highlight certain zones in some of these solid portions, particularly those near the housing area. At the same time, a perforation pattern and alternation of aluminum panels and glass allow a peek at the functions and activities inside the structure. Planting extends the neighboring park while also providing a striking contrast to the YG Headquarters’s steel facade—the green spreads to the inside of the structure on the ground level.

The ‘urban speaker’ is designed during the day to give its employees the finest possible working environment from the inside out, while at night, it glows and becomes a recognized element of the city’s skyline. The illumination design of the many interior zones in the night exploits the facade lines and perforated hues to provide a peek of several strata within the structure, accentuating the quality of performance inherent in the entertainment and music industries.

Project Info:
Architects: UNStudio
Area:18801 m²
Year: 2021
Photographs: Rohspace
Interior Design: UNStudio
Construction Supervision: UNStudio
Advisors: Gansam Architects & Partners Co. Ltd
Interior Design Collaborator: Eomji House
Interior Coordination: Studio Yuul
Lighting Design: a•g Licht
Project Team: Ben van Berkel, Astrid Piber with Marc Salemink and Tiia Vahula, Hyoseon Park, Paul Challis
Facade Design: UNStudio
Concept Design: UNStudio
Construction Drawings: Eomji House
City: Seoul
Country: South Korea