KISWIRE Museum and Training Center

About this place

Kiswire, the steel-wire company that opened its first factory in Busan's Mangmi-dong in 1963, commissioned BCHO Partners to build a museum, training center and dormitory on the hill behind its old plant, now the F1963 cultural complex. Completed in 2013, the project is half buried in the slope so that the landscape, rather than the buildings, stays in the foreground. The buildings make the company's product their structure. The museum is a wide, column-free hall under a precast, post-tensioned concrete roof whose open edges let daylight slide in and make the mass seem to hover. Inside, a spiraling ramp hangs from wires instead of resting on columns, and along the board-marked concrete facade of the training center, steel cables brace the wall diagonally down to the grass. A curved, metal-clad wall wraps the museum space and faces a reflecting pool, where a perforated metal bridge crosses overhead and the water doubles the long horizontal lines. An outdoor amphitheater, the training center and a low dormitory with views over Busan follow in a linear sequence, unified by one extruded structure. Combine the visit with F1963 just below, the converted wire factory that now houses YES24 bookshop and Terarosa coffee.