MVRDV's 'Seoul Skygarden' Wins

The site is Seoul Station Overpass, a 938-meter-long section of elevated highway that was built in the 1970s next to Seoul’s Central Station, but was deemed unsafe in 2006 and closed three years later. Rather than tear it down, residents favored an elevated park, à la New York's High Line, whose first phase was completed in 2009. Based on research that the park will nearly double the cost of its renovation and maintenance, the city launched a competition earlier in the year.

MVRDV describes their winning "Seoul Skygarden" as "an arboretum of local species, a library of plants that can be enjoyed by Seoul’s public, and a nursery for the city’s other green spaces." The plantings are arranged along the 938-meter park in "neighborhoods" in the order of the Korean alphabet, to make the Skygarden easy to navigate and give a unique character to each space.

According to the architects, "MVRDV won the competition together with a large team of experts which included Dutch landscape designer Ben Kuipers, Dutch designers Studio Makkink & Bey, local architects DMP, local landscape designers KDI, Korean structural engineers Saman and Cross, Sustainability consultants EAN, MEP consultants Samsin, traffic engineers Song Hyun R&D, lighting designers Viabizzuno and Nanam Ald, app designer nhtv, and cost engineers Myong Gun. The Government of Seoul plans to complete the project by 2017."