A team led by planning, design and engineering firm AECOM, has won an international competition for a concept design and feasibility study for Seoul Grand Park in Korea.
The firm drew from its Melbourne, New York and San Francisco studios for the winning entry, named Gaia: The Living World.
?The Seoul Metropolitan government-sponsored competition drew 21 entries internationally.
Seoul Grand Park, a 560-hectare destination with an existing zoo and an amusement park, has provided an important entertainment and recreational function to the community for thirty years.
The winning design proposed new attractions, including the Australasian Bio-Pavilion, Seoul Walk and Lakeside Park, Tree Top Village, Night Safari at the Great Savanna, Korean Forest, Jungle Cruise and an entry Winter Garden complete with a giant waterfall.
“The new Seoul Grand Park vision reinforces the park’s dual commitment to the living environment and entertainment,” said Joe Brown, FASLA, chief executive of Planning, Design + Development at AECOM.
“The Living World aspires to be a place of excitement and reflection, encounter and education, where the lines between zoo and theme park disappear,” Brown said.
The proposal opens the entire lakefront for community use, reconnecting the city to the waterfront and breaking down the traditional segregated organizational structure of visitor attractions and programming.
Melbourne-based AECOM design principal, Jon Shinkfield, and associate designer, Blake Sanborn, were said to play pivitol roles in the conception and configuration of the masterplan, while fellow studio members, including designer, Simon Bussiere, and ecological engineering principal, Peter Breen, also contributed to the winning proposal.
AECOM’s connection to Seoul Grand Park extends to its former companies EDAW, a landscape architecture and planning firm which developed the original theme park plan in the 1980s, and ERA, an economic consulting firm which conducted the economic feasibility study of the original Seoul Grand Park in the late 1970s and a revitalization program for the Seoul Zoo in 2001.
Howard Altman, senior vice president with AECOM’s Design + Planning practice, directed the original design and participated in the current competition.
“This is a unique opportunity to re-think Seoul Grand Park, taking amusement and zoo attractions into a new paradigm of leisure, entertainment and learning for the future,” he said.
The AECOM team was supported by local South Korean firms Ga-One Landscape Design and Group Han Associates, as well as Thinkwell Design & Production and Bernard Harrison & Friends.
In Australia, AECOM has worked on the newly opened Southport Broadwater Parklands on the Gold Coast, the Millennium Markers in Homebush Bay, Sydney and Werribee Open Range Zoo in Melbourne.
