Shin Young Masterplanned Community at Cheongju City, South Korea
A city within a city, the proposed mixed-use development on a former industrial site on the western edge of Cheongju includes over 4,000 housing units in high-rise and mid-rise towers, a massive entertainment and shopping complex, government service buildings, several office towers, pedestrian plazas, greenspace, parks, bike trails, and a “culture plaza” as a tribute to the area's long established dominance in the area of arts and handicrafts.
Collaborating with lead U.S. architects, PDI, IOTA generated several iterative masterplan schemes in sketch form, each one overlaying the site with specific and abstract references to the local influences, such as indigenous landscape types, the various Korean art media, or the region’s enthusiastic embrace of cutting edge information technology, referred to locally as “U-Design.” In the end, the proposal represented a collage of these various influences – a rich tapestry of the city’s heritage woven into a future-forward, high-density urban village.