10-11-2017

Shigeru Ban’s curved wooden structure for the Golf Club in Yeoju, Gyeonggi, South Korea

Shigeru Ban,

Seoul, South Korea,

Sport & Wellness,

Wood,

Shigeru Ban’s structural signature curved wooden structures may be found in many of his projects, including the Golf Club in Yeoju, Gyeonggi, South Korea.



Shigeru Ban’s curved wooden structure for the Golf Club in Yeoju, Gyeonggi, South Korea The 9-hole Golf Club in Yeoju, South Korea has a series of buildings totalling 4300 square metres located at the entrance and other parts of a golf course covering 1 million square metres of land. But the unrivalled protagonist of the project is the great hall in the Clubhouse featuring the curved wooden structure that has become Shigeru Ban’s distinctive sign.
The entire volume of the main Golf Club buildings forms a big poem written in typical Oriental kanji. The simple, minimalist vocabulary of concrete cubes is flanked by that of more important spaces adding a mystical sense to the place, in keeping with the well cared-for Korean landscape. The building contains a residence, a restaurant and reception area, and most of the construction is set into the hill, with a fair amount underground, allowing the most important volume, the hall, to emerge above ground. It is a 70x36 m building with a height ranging from 15 to 16 metres, elevated on 21 composite pillars, all made with 12 strips of solid curved wood, which open up fan-like as they rise upwards from the foundations. And as they are modelled and interwoven with elements coming from other pillars to design a highly evocative ribbed vault, the landscape of the vault is revealed, composed of characteristic hexagonal openings.
Each pillar is prefabricated in parts, so that the trunk at the base and the tip reaching the roof blend harmoniously with each other and with the other pillars to create the magical sensation that they are supported without bolts. The joints consist of invisible steel flanges joined by tie rods, located inside the strip of wood and in the vault itself so that they do not interrupt the linearity of the design of each individual structural element. The rich geometric design of the wood ensures that the metal inserts are visible only to an expert eye attempting to discover how this prodigy of static engineering is achieved. Moreover, skylights allow the pillars to act as ventilation flues for bringing fresh air into the room.
The same structural ingenuity appears in the other pavilions located along the 9-hole golf course, from the starter point to the romantic little ponds. 

Fabrizio Orsini 

Location: Yeoju, Gyeonggi, South Korea
Architects: Kyeong-Sik Yoon / KACI International + SHIGERU BAN ARCHITECTS
Structure Engineers: Structural engineering / Creation Holz (Timber)
Service Engineers: HANA CONSULTING ENGINEERS (Electricity), SAHM-SHIN
Engineer Construction: CJ Engineering & Construction
Site Area: 1,128,370.00m2
Building Area: 4,299.28m2
Total Floor Area:20,995.64 m2
Floors: 1Basement 3 Stories
Structures: Timber Construction, Steel Construction, Steel-reinforced Concrete
Design date: November 2006 – June 2008
Construction date:July 2008 – April 2010
Photos: Hiroyuki Hirai

×
×

Stay in touch with the protagonists of architecture, Subscribe to the Floornature Newsletter