INCHEON, SOUTH KOREA - The new 300-room, five-star-rated Sheraton Incheon Hotel recently opened in New Songdo City, Korea, offering a new state-of-the-art facility in the heart of a new urban center.

HOK provided architectural design, landscape design and sustainable design services for the new 500,000-square-foot, LEED certified hotel.

Adjacent to the city's new Convention Center, the Northeast Asia Trade Tower and a large retail mall, the hotel is connected to the buildings through a series of plazas and landscaped areas, and underground by a parking structure spanning the site.



The tower section of the hotel includes 300 guestrooms and suites, a presidential suite and an executive lounge on the top floor. Hotel amenities, including ballrooms, function rooms, spa, gym, pool, restaurants and bar, are located on the five lower levels of the wing adjacent to the tower.

Sustainable strategies helped guide the hotel design. The façades of the hotel rooms are faceted to minimize the exposure to direct solar gain, and this reduced solar load is shaded further by custom vertical sunshading devices.

"The facades of the guestroom tower were specifically designed to be broken into four-story-tall, two-room-wide modules that are fractured and angled further away from direct solar radiation," says HOK New York Design Director Kenneth Drucker, FAIA, LEED AP. "As a final detail, each of these modules is shaded by two, four-story-tall perforated aluminum sunshades." The lower, amenity wing of the hotel is wrapped in a reflective, metal roof that shades portions of the glazed facades below.

New Songdo City exists as a prototype model of new city expansion and development, designed to be self-sustaining neighborhoods with connective links to surrounding urban centers. It is located on the west coast of Korea, and is connected to the new Incheon International Airport by Yeongjong Bridge, and ties to the existing urban context of Incheon. The major transportation links define a central zone of the city where a denser zone of commercial and mixed-use projects surround a large central park.

Within the master plan of the New Songdo City urban center, HOK is also design architect for four separate mixed-use projects. Spanning the length of the northern edge of the park are Blocks D22, D23 and D24, which are mixed-use development sites of residential and commercial space.


Type Tourism - Hotel
Location : Incheon Korea, Democratic People's Republic of 
Client : Gale International 
Building status : built in 2009 
Number of stories : 25 
Site type : urban 
Building area : 500000 sqft 


HOK

Polymorphic Stasis - Imagine a city where traffic flows are controlled autonomously, imagine a building that can produce all the energy it needs; like a living, breathing, and thinking organism, the future city of Seoul will be adaptable, intelligent, and self-sufficient.



Layered Urbanism is a new approach to thinking about the way urban environment is composed, through genesis of multiple or layered components that exists in equilibrium via sensors and communication channels; like the outer layer of the human skin with its complex mixture of organic matter designed to function and react to environmental and biological changes or cerebral and optic nerve center guiding all voluntary organ and muscle function.



By designing buildings and municipalities with automation, intelligence, and emergence (symbiotic and cooperative relationship), the new Seoul will be able to meet all the challenges of the growing, sustainable future city.



Type Cultural - Cultural Center
Transport - Bus Station, Train station, Port Facility, Boat pier, Parking structure
Public - Park
Location Han Gang River : Seoul Korea, Republic of 
Client : Seoul Metropolitan Government 
Building status : unbuilt 
Site size : 28 m2 
Site type : urban 
Building area : 500000 sqft 

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