The growth of sustainable cities depends on improving the integration of ecological stewardship into city planning efforts. This project leverages principles of landscape ecology to generate a new civic campus. Typical urban forestry and ecological conservation approaches in cities focus on remnant vegetation and manage forest reserves outside of the urban systems. Instead, we propose to manage a new forest within the city. Typical public space approaches focus on program and treat landscape as a thin surface for recreation or resource for exploitation and consumption. Instead, we propose a thick and diverse landscape that challenges expectations for a civic campus. Planting is controlled but not overly maintained, and combines with the roof form, which can be optimized to provide social, ecological, and infrastructural advantages. The planting alternates between forest and meadow, creating moments of prospect and refuge along a loop path that offers wide promenades and also intimate moments of reflection and discovery. Folded topographic “pleats” enhance this range of experiences, and also promote microclimate cooling and utility benefits for the building. The thermal mass of deep soils, calibrated for economical alignment with the structural system, becomes a productive ground for the forest island ecology.

Working together, the urban and ecological frameworks underpinning our project form a public venue that will not only accommodate the city’s growth and evolution, but foster it.

To address the requirements of the brief for a New City Hall, the landscape strategy focuses on three primary objectives:

• Promote democratic use of public space, characterized by openness and flexibility

• Maximize the performance of the landscape systems, including increased ecological value, biodiversity, and resilience

• Minimize human input and impact on the ecological reserve located at the roof

To achieve these performance and maintenance goals, the landscape design uses a rigorous layout of iconic as well as ubiquitous species in Korea, arranging the planted layers in alternating grids. This achieves a remarkable informality and sense of wilderness, while promoting clear and minimal management and maintenance.

These goals are embodied in each of the three major landscapes of the project:

Ways

These fully public spaces are the interior streets and plazas that link across the project site and bring the dynamic qualities and characters of Cheongju city into the grounds of the New City Hall. The Ways are flexible surfaces that allow direct links east to west across the City Hall campus, and also extend the existing network of public plazas in Cheongju, especially the public plazas south of the City Hall site. They are paved in a regional granite that evokes both the deep geologic history of the Korean peninsula and the rich cultural heritage of civic buildings, including palaces and fortresses.

The perimeter streets leverage the Haengrang typology as not only a civic and social framework but also a spatial threshold. Further, the streets are promoted as shared surfaces, where vehicles cede to pedestrians and drivers are challenged to interpret subtle cues in paving to distinguish drive lanes. This concept extends south of the project and anticipates the extension and amplification of the pedestrian walking street adjacent to the site.

Courts

The project engages a classic and regionally sensitive courtyard typology, imagining these not as spatial or architectural voids, but as strong horticultural figures that structure one’s experience at City Hall. These semi-public spaces provide alternative access to space for rest or recreation, and intimacy or interaction.

A woodland court for exploration and discovery provides indirect ecological education to daycare visitors and a pleasant view with access to daylight and breezes for the adjacent offices. A civic court at the primary administrative building has a durable, mineral surface with seat walls to promote rest and gathering. A grid of canopy trees grants additional shade and shapes a restful destination. A granite garden court promotes pine ecologies and mitigates groundwater infiltration issues at the south of the site. A curated wilderness court links ground to sky, with direct access from the underground parkade to the robust rooftop forest.

Each courtyard may be accessed across the dynamic and adaptive facades of each building, allowing the courts to fully support adjacent interior programs.

Roof

The living roof is thick with opportunity and optimism for the future. As a highly constructed ground, the roof garden is intensely and intentionally not naturalistic. The form is shaped by attention to soil as foundation for robust ecological futures. The several “pleats” evoke the nearby forested mountains and floodplain rivers. This hyper-natural emphasis on microtopography and microclimate helps promote change, difference, and horticultural experimentation.

The gridded planting provides cues to care, emphasizing native and resilient species, while also framing expansive views and offering intimate spaces. While envisioned as an ecological reserve, the roof garden is highly accessible, linked by bridges and ramps to City Hall, which becomes a centering and highly visible institutional figure.