It’s official. South Korea’s top wooden building is a two-storey visitor centre in a former whaling port, crowned with the grand prize at the national wooden architecture awards. That is according to Nam-gu, the Ulsan district on the south-east coast, which revealed last week that The Wave had won the Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport’s award.
“This award recognises the harmony of Jangsaengpo’s character, timber’s beauty, and cutting-edge tourism content,” said Lim Hyeon-cheol, Nam-gu’s mayor, whose district put 7 billion won into the building. Nam-gu said the judges noted that The Wave brings timber and media technology together in a single building, and that its spaces reflect the sea and whales of Jangsaengpo.
Designed by Professor Kim Beom-kwan of Ulsan University’s School of Design Convergence and architect Heo Chang-yeol of CULTURA Architects, The Wave rests on posts and beams of Japanese sugi cedar. Work on the 486-square-metre building began last October, and Nam-gu opened it to visitors in June, eight months later, at the gateway to the port’s Whale Culture Special Zone.
Monorail riders pass through a 31-metre-long media-facade tunnel at The Wave, which Nam-gu says is the first of its kind in the country. Along the way, LED screens and surround sound play scenes of whales swimming through an undersea world, which the district is counting on to draw visitors to Jangsaengpo after dark.
At ground level, The Wave houses the ticket booth for Ulsan’s whale-watching cruises, whilst the second floor and roof open onto viewing decks over the sea. Next door, the Jangsaengpo Whale Museum has told the story of a port that was the centre of South Korean whaling until the 1986 commercial ban.
To win, The Wave had to clear two rounds of judging, with a portfolio review followed by site visits the association scheduled for August and September. It came out on top of a field that included Gochang County’s Hwang Yun-seok Library, a 3,814-square-metre timber building on the west coast that took an excellence award.
“Timber construction is a leading eco-friendly way of building for the carbon-neutral era,” said Kang Seung-hee, president of the Korea Wood Construction Association, when entries opened in May. The association runs the awards, now in their 24th edition, for the Korea Forest Service, whilst the ceremony is set for the Seoul Energy Dream Center in November.
Ulsan’s win comes as South Korea opens its rulebook to taller timber, with developers long held to four or five storeys in wood until the government abolished an 18-metre height cap. Seoul practice Gansam has since begun the country’s first timber high-rise, a 13-storey apartment tower whose cross-laminated timber walls and floors, milled from Finnish spruce, bear the load.
South Korea already ranks among the largest buyers of Japanese logs, with sugi covering 4.4 million of the 10 million hectares of forest Japan has planted. The Japan Wood-Products Export Association won US certification for sugi two-by-fours last year and is working to enter new markets, Australia among them, with sugi and hinoki softwood.
