PC Church

Design Concept

The site is located at the urban area close to the down-town of Daegu, one of the biggest Cities in South Korea. In contrast to its locality, this town is isolated from the major city development. The community gets older, and young couples tends to move out from the town to have better education for their children. The community even agrees of this change as inevitable fact.

As an architect who deeply studied and knew so much about the area, our ideas on the new architecture was more than brining a landmark or something special. It was to make a change for the community to give them the new cultural experience, the icon and even a hope that which the community shouts out to others the town is not dead.

In addition to this major aspect of design task, we further explored. The elderly people in the church are outnumbered among church members. The infrastructure for them was too outdated. Especially, the location of the church with shortage of parking space worsens the approaches for those seniors.

Design Description

Based on the limited budget about 2.8 million USD for 3,500sm building; it ought to be a difficult task how we could achieve high with minimum financial input. Firstly, by separating two major elements, one is 900sm parking area and the other 2600sm for the function of the building. Our base design has to be very functional to meet the budget constraint, so the parking grid on plan is first thing we have to comply with in order to save cost and bring most efficient layout. Thus, the core design for the staircase and elevator was planned to make as compact space as possible.

Not to mention, we had to deeply contemplate about the Christianity as well. The symbolic idea of Christianity had to be revealed to align with Christians’ lives. We tried to express the definition of the Heaven referred from one of Beatitudes from the Bible, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven. Simply, it means despite harsh circumstances confronting us; our life will experience the Heaven through the condition of being poor in spirit.

Architecturally, the sloped hill to the site was a catalyst to enhance the obtuse or acute angles of the exterior shape as a form of life that would represent anguish, pain, sadness.  And we added a mirror box in the middle of the mass, which is the worship sanctuary, to reflect the sky for church members to remember to look up the heaven despite their hardship on daily lives.