Located on the playground of Yongam Elementary School in Yongsan-gu, the woodworking workshop is an educational facility selected as a pilot project by the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education. Conceived as a shared woodworking education space, it is used collectively by local residents, students, and teachers. Reflecting the school’s high proportion of students from multicultural families, the workshop was planned to host a range of hands-on programs through which diverse members of the community can share a single space via the act of making. Through the process of production, the project seeks to foster a sense of community and position the space as a platform for social connection.
To architecturally embody these values, the interior was designed with a heavy timber structure, expressing the inherent structural beauty and spatial depth of timber construction. In contrast, the exterior adopts a light-frame timber system to ensure rational insulation performance and construction efficiency. Windows facing the outside are set at a low eye level in consideration of the students’ physical scale, allowing visual interaction with friends playing on the schoolyard even from within the workshop. The spatial depth created by the heavy timber structure is further utilized to accommodate the storage and display of various woodworking tools and materials. Interior furnishings were also designed using environmentally friendly materials such as birch plywood and paper tubes.
This project was realized as a socially contributive public work within a limited budget and was completed through the support and collaboration of multiple material suppliers.