1990uao and Jadric Architektur Turn a Daegu Apartment Block into a Cultural Anchor for Its Neighborhood

South Korea's "Soft City Renewal" policy is a bet that you don't need to demolish a neighborhood to save it. You need a catalyst, something small enough to fit inside an existing building but legible enough to shift how people use an entire block. The Daegu Anchor Facility, completed in November 2022 in Suseong-gu, is exactly that kind of bet. Designed by Seoul-based 1990uao and Vienna-based Jadric Architektur, the project strips a nondescript apartment building near Deulan Children's Park back to its concrete bones and rebuilds it as a 399-square-meter hybrid of artist-in-residence studios, workshop space, library, and open-air cinema for the surrounding community.

What makes the project worth studying is not the program list but the surgical precision with which the architects reconfigured the building's section. By partially opening floors and reconnecting the staircase into a single continuous volume, the formerly fragmented residential units become a legible public interior. An expanded aluminum double skin wraps the upper stories, replacing an energy-hemorrhaging facade with a breathable veil that admits light and air while signaling, unmistakably, that this is no longer a private building. The ground floor peels open toward the park, trading its old parking area for a semi-outdoor communal zone painted in a bold orange that functions as both threshold and town square.

An Orange Invitation at Grade

The architects understood that a community anchor lives or dies at its ground plane. The orange-painted ground floor operates as a gradient between street, park, and interior. Angled partition walls carve out alcoves without sealing off sightlines, and large openings toward what was once a parking area turn dead infrastructure into a flexible event space. The color choice is deliberate: against the muted concrete and white metal screening above, the orange acts as a wayfinding device, pulling passersby in from the sidewalk without requiring signage.

This is where the building hosts its most public functions: outdoor screenings via beam projector, a lending library, electric vehicle charging, and seasonal workshops. The key move is that none of it is permanent. The ground floor is kept deliberately loose, a platform rather than a finished room, so that the Suseong-gu district can reprogram it as needs change.

The Sectional Cut That Makes It Work

If the orange ground level is the public handshake, the vertical section is the building's real argument. The architects opened up the stairwell and portions of each floor plate to create a continuous interior volume where visual and acoustic connections run from ground to roof. Standing on the upper circulation balconies, you look down through layers of red brick piers, metal mesh railings, and cast-in-place concrete to the lobby below. The stairwell, once a fire escape afterthought in the original apartment layout, becomes the social spine of the entire building.

White-painted treads against raw concrete walls give the stair a graphic crispness that reads almost diagrammatic. It is a deliberate contrast to the warm brick and timber elsewhere, a reminder that you are moving through a building that has been redesigned to be legible, not cozy. For a facility housing visiting artists, this kind of passive surveillance, knowing who is around and what is happening on other floors, builds the casual encounters that residency programs depend on.

Red Brick and Concrete: The Interior Material Palette

Inside the upper floors, the architects deploy a limited material vocabulary with discipline. Red brick half-height walls define studio zones and common areas without reaching the ceiling, preserving the cross-sectional openness that the renovation fought hard to achieve. Exposed concrete beams and columns from the original structure are left visible, honestly marking the boundary between old and new. Natural light drops in from above through translucent skylights, washing the concrete portal frames and timber benches in a diffuse glow that eliminates the need for artificial lighting during the day.

The combination works because the materials are complementary in temperature: warm brick against cool concrete, smooth metal railings against rough masonry. Exposed ceiling services, ductwork and conduit left in view, keep the ceiling plane high and reinforce the building's identity as a working facility rather than a polished gallery. Individual studio units can be opened or closed with operable partitions, giving residents the ability to toggle between communal and private modes without leaving the building.

A Double Skin That Breathes

From the street, the most visible change is the expanded aluminum metal panel screen that envelops the upper stories. The old facade was stripped entirely, its poor insulation and deteriorating finishes replaced with a double-skin system: lightweight insulation against the structure, then an air gap, then the perforated metal cladding. The screen covers existing window openings but does not seal them. Light filters through the perforations in a soft, dappled pattern, and natural ventilation moves freely through the gap, reducing mechanical cooling loads.

Portions of the screen are modular and openable, so occupants can adjust the facade to suit weather or program. It is a low-cost, low-maintenance solution that manages to do three things at once: upgrade the envelope's thermal performance, give the building a new civic identity, and preserve the fenestration rhythm of the original apartment block underneath. The white panels also bounce indirect light into the interiors, contributing to the luminous quality visible in the upper corridor and atrium spaces.

Why This Project Matters

The Daegu Anchor Facility is a proof of concept for a particular kind of urban renewal: one that rejects the tabula rasa of demolition in favor of strategic renovation. By reusing the concrete frame of an unremarkable apartment building, 1990uao and Jadric Architektur avoided the embodied carbon cost of new construction while delivering a building that performs better thermally, spatially, and socially than its predecessor. The project's value lies not in spectacle but in replicability. Every aging residential neighborhood in South Korea, and beyond, contains buildings like this one, structurally sound but programmatically obsolete, waiting for the sectional surgery and civic ambition to become something more useful.

What elevates the project above a simple renovation is its understanding of scale. At 399 square meters it is modest, but its effects radiate outward: connecting residents to the adjacent park, drawing foot traffic through the ground-level program, and establishing a visible cultural address in a neighborhood that previously had none. The architects have built an anchor in the literal sense, a fixed point around which a community can reorganize. Whether the Suseong-gu district's broader renewal ambitions succeed will depend on many factors beyond architecture, but the Anchor Facility demonstrates that the right building in the right location, at a fraction of the cost of new construction, can shift the narrative of an entire block.

Daegu Anchor Facility by 1990uao and Jadric Architektur. Located in Suseong-gu, Daegu, South Korea. 399 m². Completed November 2022. Photography by Namgoong Sun.

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