Korean Pavilion - The FAR Game
The Korean urban architect works under the constant pressure of two opposing forces. One comes from Seoul’s hyper-density; the greater Seoul metropolitan area, representing 12% of South Korea’s land mass, is home to nearly half of the citizens of the entire country. Hence plot prices are at a premium, and the architect is always under strict orders to augment useable floor area in order to maximize a developer’s and land owner’s profits. The other is an urban building regulatory system where strict and unyielding rules give public officials little discretion for negotiation.
Korean architects must therefore always be prepared to perform a high-wire balancing act with this constant battle referred to as ‘playing the FAR (Floor Area Ratio) Game. Korea’s hyper-dense urban centres have long maintained strict limits on FAR for each zoning area, as part of the urban rules that all buildings are designed to. It is this interplay between land, rules and building that make the floor area ratio so important.
Above: The red highlighted areas mark building elements exempt from the FAR calculations
The main target is medium-scale multi-family houses or mixed-use buildings, which in earlier times would not have been on the radar of most architects. Traditionally, these structures were designed on purely pragmatic grounds by local builders and developers without any professional design training. However, in the years since the financial crash of 2008 when signs of economic uncertainty in large-scale development began to arise, landowners have seen the potential to turn to architects for their design ingenuity. Whilst FAR maximisation is important for revenue, the landowners came to realise that exclusive focus on FAR might result in spaces offering a poor quality of life. By turning to creative small developers and atelier design companies, the landowners found they could increase the useable floor area, attract better tenants and ultimately demand higher rent.
How is the FAR game played? The set of 4 diagrams below demonstrates how:
A: a hypothetical building envelope regulated by the limits of urban and building regulations
B: a hypothetical building mass accommodating the specific functions required by clients without losing floor area or volume within the envelope
C: extended volumes or surfaces with formal and configurational innovations
D: the realized building
Facing this tug-of- war between private profit and public regulation, how is the Korean architect truly to ply his trade, and infuse his work with some form of aesthetic or socio-cultural considerations? The answer from today’s Korean architects, evidenced by the 36 buildings showcased in this exhibit, is to use the constraints brought on by the FAR game to spark their creativity rather than allowing those constraints to stifle it. These projects are now providing fertile grounds for creative responses to the intense high-stakes pressures of the FAR game.
Above: Models demonstrating the leap from a building mass depicting the various regulatory and site constraints (Diagram A) to end product resulting from the architect’s process (Diagram D).
Above: Beyond the Screen by OBBA. Seoul, South Korea, 2013. An exemplar project demonstrating the creative response of Korean architects to the highly restrictive regulations.