Downtown Seoul is home to one of Zaha Hadid’s iconic creations: the Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP). This major cultural center encompasses a museum, design centre, and expansive exhibition and conference spaces, organised into three distinct zones within the building’s shell. These zones are interconnected through a complex network of interior, exterior, and underground routes.
The building’s entirely curvilinear design features no internal columns, and with only a few windows, its matte white walls extend seamlessly from floor to ceiling. These unique architectural elements, while visually striking, pose significant challenges for visitor orientation, making wayfinding a critical consideration.
Applied served as the primary wayfinding consultant for the DDP’s wayfinding and signage project, working as part of a local consortium. A driving element to the project was to treat the three separate spaces encompassed within the shell as individual buildings with distinctive identities, while retaining awareness of the routes between them. Applied meticulously researched and analysed the space, context and its potential visitors to devise a principle wayfinding strategy.
The wayfinding strategy decoded the spaces, providing a system that simplifies understanding of physical and virtual connections within the DDP building, to the wider campus and to adjacent transport stations.
10 million
visitors each year
931,875 sq ft
floor area
45,133
cladding panels
SEGD Merit Award