Galleria Gwanggyo

About this place

Galleria in Gwanggyo is a department store completed in 2020 in Gwanggyo New Town, Yeongtong-gu, on the northeast edge of Suwon in Gyeonggi-do. It was designed by OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), making it OMA's first completed project in South Korea, and the sixth branch of the Galleria luxury department store chain. The building's defining element is its facade: the entire external surface is clad in a mosaic of stone tiles in varying shades and textures, assembled in a pixelated pattern that references the irregular paving stones of traditional Korean plazas and courtyards. From a distance the surface reads as a single textured mass; close up, it resolves into thousands of individual stone pieces. The massing is a monolithic block that rises directly from its site next to Gwanggyo Lake Park, with the park's water visible from the building's upper terraces. Inside, the seven-storey retail floors are organised around a series of atria and voids that bring natural light deep into the building's plan. Roof terraces and exterior walkways extend the retail experience toward the park, positioning the building as a destination within the Gwanggyo development rather than a self-contained box. OMA's design uses the pixelated stone skin to navigate a tension specific to luxury retail architecture: the building must be visually distinctive enough to define the Galleria brand while reading as contextually grounded within Gwanggyo's mix of residential towers and lake landscape. The stone mosaic — drawing on Korean material history while operating at a contemporary architectural scale — is OMA's solution to this problem. The building was widely published on completion and has become one of the most photographed retail buildings in Korea.