Evergreen Church / Kode Architects

Prologue: New Downtown Church - We believe that there is another landscape created when a new building blends into the existing landscape, so we consider it very important to read and understand the context and landscape around the site in the design process. However, Banwol-dong, Hwaseong-si, where the subject site of this project is located, is a neighborhood that is shaping a new downtown through urban development projects. Therefore, there were two main points we focused on in this project. First, "What should the church look like in the new landscape being created, not the existing landscape?" Second, "What should the church look like in the urban landscape?". Although most buildings have a long lifespan, churches, especially, are places that connect religion and people, so they repair old buildings and expand them when space is lacking, always standing in the same place. Since we fully understood this, designing the church, which will stand here for a long time in the future, was a very careful and cautious task. Moreover, since the surrounding landscape was in the transitional phase of being created, we did not know how it would turn out, but we thought it should be made to match the future completed landscape. Fortunately, the site was being developed through an urban development project, and it was clear that the building would be located in an urban landscape in the future. In conclusion, we came up with a simple and calm church that would naturally blend into the urban landscape and match whatever the surrounding landscape would look like.