U.GA Architects Wraps an Oval Rooftop Pool in Curved Board-Formed Concrete on Busan's Jeollidan-gil

Jeonpo-dong in Busan used to sound like work. The alley was a metalworking district, a strip of grinding and cutting behind steel shutters. Those shutters have since given way to glass shopfronts, and the street now trades as Jeollidan-gil, one of the city's café and retail destinations. U.GA Architects, led by Dae-woo Yu with Soon-jung Shim and Hyo-kyung Kwon, has added a 454 m² mixed-use building to that changing street. It is called Urban Egg, and the name fits: a pale, curved concrete shell that clearly holds something inside.

The architects describe the building as a spatial "crevice" between the neighborhood's industrial past and its commercial present. We read that as intent, not proof. What the drawings and photographs do show is more concrete, literally. The building puts a neighborhood facility at street level and accommodation on the floors above, and it ends in an oval water space wrapped by spiraling walls. The tension between a hard, almost defensive exterior and a soft, curved, water-centered interior is the most interesting thing here.

A Pale Shell on a Shifting Street

Seen from the street, Urban Egg sits between low rooftops and the apartment towers that are steadily taking over this part of Busan. It does not compete with either on height. It competes on form. The curved upper volume reads as one sculpted mass, while the glazed ground floor follows the shopfront logic of the rest of Jeollidan-gil.

That split matters. The base belongs to the street and its economy of looking through glass. The upper floors pull back into perforated block openings and small punched windows, so the building gets more private as it rises. The street gets what it needs, and the program above gets protection from it.

Board-Formed Concrete as Memory

Concrete and wood are the only materials credited, and the concrete carries most of the weight. Vertical board marks run up the curved walls, leaving the grain of the timber formwork on every surface. On a street that has swapped steel for glass, this is a deliberate choice of a material that shows how it was made.

A vertical light slot cuts through the tower face, and small square windows sit where you would expect larger openings. The result is an elevation that feels closer to a workshop or a silo than to a retail frontage. Whether or not you buy the "crevice" narrative, the texture does reference the alley's industrial character more honestly than a cladding panel could.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.