Designed by Chiasmus Partners, I Tower is located a few blocks from Gangnam’s business district, a symbol of modern Seoul that features a concentration of commerce, corporate and residential areas where one can find many digital design advertisement agencies. These characteristics of the location, and the emerging digital advertising brand’s demand for a ‘new type of office building’, meant that there existed a need to incorporate functional flexibility, efficiency, and symbolic significance. To further illustrate the context, the site is located at a block corner and faces a small park to the north, around which there are residential buildings of three to five stories. Facing the park to the north and the business district’s high rise buildings to the south, the design needed a balance between not disrupting the neighborhood’s public space and forming a part of the urban landscape. Photography: Namsun Lee
Under these circumstances, the objective of establishing a space for conferences, lectures, events, and leisure for 200 employees had to be achieved in a building with a height to width ratio of 2:1.

To build a comprehensive floor plan with compact core elements required establishing efficiency in space through minimizing circulation and construction costs. Given the limitations presented by the building’s elevation, the mass was established almost sculpturally but every floor plan is a square.
Photography: Namsun Lee
The outer c...