Busan is South Korea’s port city, harboring nearly all the country’s water shipping and transportation – including the ever-multiplying number of cruise ships – and it’s booming. Not so long ago, the city’s Gwangbok Harbor District was a fishing village, but now it’s bustling with commerce. It’s also being transformed by department-store giant Lotte with its waterfront development that includes a shopping mall, discount store, cinema complex and 150-story tower expected to be among the tallest in the world.
Phase 1 of Lotte’s Gwangbok project was a signature department store at the center of all the activity, designed by ID & Design Intl. (IDDI, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.). Lotte, which pointedly wanted to target a young demographic, was competing with the harbor area’s pedestrian-only fashion street lined with up-to-date boutiques. So IDDI’s goal was not just to create a dazzling store, but to craft a brand identity for Lotte that would stick with shoppers long after they’d left.
Inspired by its location, the design’s centerpiece is a sculpture of 10,000 fishlike shapes suspended from the ceiling and descending over the atrium through all the surrounding floors. The cords are gathered in spots, suggesting a spiral motion and swaying slightly in the natural drafts of the huge space so the aluminum fish shimmer in the light. IDDI conceived the sculpture jointly with the Toronto custom art studio Moss & Lam, which engineered and installed it.
“Whatever floor you’re on, when you look toward the atrium you’re seeing bits and pieces of this school of fish,” says IDDI president and creative director Sherif Ayad, “and that creates connectivity among all the levels.” That connectivity is crucial given the variety of design attributes used across the floors, though all of them reinforce the theme of fluidity. These include broad, wavelike arcs in the floor and ceiling patterns; partitions with kelp-like descending bands; decorative lighting in irregular lines of blue neon; and globular chairs that might suggest rocks on the sea floor.
The store sits atop a subway portal, and its many points of connection – to the subway, the street and future elements of the development project – became one of the main challenges of the project. So designers tried to draw all the traffic and attention toward the atrium using colonnades illuminated by internal blue-green lighting, crevasse-like recessions in the ceiling and long, snaking chandeliers of glimmering beads that appear almost as sprays of water.
In its effort to appeal to the young and affluent, and further guiding customer circulation inward and upward, Lotte made the unusual move of putting its more youth-oriented departments – juniors, trend casual, sportswear, etc. – on the easily visible lower levels and pushing areas such as womenswear, kids and home to the upper floors. The result is a younger presence throughout the atrium than would have been achieved otherwise.
Ultimately, the mission was to create an unforgettable identity for this store that would attach to the Lotte brand. “Today, so many department stores are designed the same way that you often can’t tell what store you’re in,” says Ayad. “They’re driven by the brands, but they all carry the same ones so they start to become homogenized. I think if you can leave a store and a year later be able to recollect a certain feeling or element of the environment, that’s a successful design.”
PROJECT SUPPLIERS
RETAILER: Lotte Department Stores, Seoul, Korea
DESIGN: ID & Design Intl., Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
ARCHITECT: Lotte Architecture & Engineering Division, Seoul, Korea
GENERAL CONTRACTOR: Lotte Construction Division, Seoul, Korea
ATRIUM SCULPTURE: Moss and Lam Inc., Toronto