YIN YANG Old HANGLAS

Every national flag is an architectural document. It encodes a civilization’s understanding of balance, force, and the relationship between opposites — the same concerns that govern how a city organizes itself across a site. The Old Hanglas Development Plan in South Korea began by reading the Taegukgi not as a symbol but as a planning diagram.

The site at Old Hanglas occupies a coastal position of considerable geographic privilege — a waterfront edge with simultaneous access to open sea views and an established urban interior. The development brief called for a mixed-use district capable of absorbing housing, commercial program, public landscape, and civic infrastructure within a single coherent planning logic. The design did not begin with a zoning diagram. It began with the four trigrams of the Korean flag and the Taeguk symbol at its center: the ancient principle of Yin and Yang as a generative organizational force applied to the ground plane of a contemporary development.

Location          Old Hanglas, South Korea
Client            Old Hanglas Development
Type              Mixed-Use Urban Development — Competition Entry
Program           Housing, Commercial, Botanical Garden, Baywalk, Recreational Parks
Status            Competition Proposal
Year              2021
Principal         Ibrahim Nawaf Joharji
Scope             Urban Planning, Generative Design, Coastal Infrastructure

The Taeguk at the center of the Korean flag represents the continuous movement between two opposing forces — neither dominant, neither static, each containing the seed of the other. This is not a decorative motif. It is a spatial and philosophical model for how a community organizes itself: public against private, built against open, active against restful. The four trigrams surrounding the Taeguk encode the four classical elements in their broken and unbroken line configurations. Each trigram was assigned to one of the development’s primary programmatic zones, its line pattern translated into the built density, height, and permeability of that zone. The flag’s internal proportional system governed the site’s sectional decisions — where the development rises, where it opens to the water, where it yields to landscape.

The Baywalk establishes the project’s primary experiential sequence. Arriving from the water or from the city edge, the visitor first encounters the open coastal promenade — a continuous public edge that separates the sea from the built mass behind it without ever blocking the view. The Baywalk is the Yin boundary of the plan: the yielding, open, horizontal element against which the megastructure’s vertical mass reads as Yang. The botanical garden occupies the transitional zone between the Baywalk and the first residential layers, a planted threshold that manages the acoustic and visual transition from the waterfront’s exposed scale to the inhabited interior of the development. Recreational parks distribute through the plan following the trigram logic, their positions calculated to equalize green access across the full residential population rather than concentrating amenity at the site’s most commercially valuable edges.

The megastructure against the Korean coastal horizon: the Yin and Yang principle resolved in built mass and open water, neither dominant across the site. © INJ Architects
The development at waterfront scale: the Baywalk edge holding the transition between sea and city, the botanical garden visible as a planted layer behind the promenade. © INJ Architects

The megastructure is the plan’s primary Yang element — the concentrated built mass that anchors the development against the open water and the distributed landscape. Its form was generated through a data and research driven process: site orientation, prevailing wind patterns, solar angles, and the panoramic view corridors available from each level of the building were mapped before any massing decision was made. The resulting form curves in response to these inputs, its profile shifting as it rises to maximize sea-facing exposure on the upper residential levels while reducing wind load on the lower commercial floors. The curvature is not styled. It is calculated — the same rotational quality present in the Taeguk symbol, now expressed as an environmental response rather than a graphic one.

The site plan: the four trigram zones visible in the distribution of program — each quadrant holding its own density and permeability according to the flag’s internal proportional logic. © INJ Architects
The Baywalk promenade at ground level: the continuous coastal edge that holds the development’s Yin boundary against the open water of the Korean coast. © INJ Architects
The panoramic sea view analysis: view corridors mapped from each residential level, their weight translated into the building section’s curvature and the floor plate orientations above. © INJ Architects
The botanical garden threshold: the planted transition zone between the Baywalk’s exposed scale and the residential interior, its density calibrated to the trigram logic governing that quadrant. © INJ Architects
The megastructure interior: commercial and mixed-use levels at the base, the residential section rising through the curved body above, the sea visible from every floor oriented toward the water. © INJ Architects
The recreational park network: distributed through the plan at intervals derived from the trigram positions, green access equalized across the full residential population rather than concentrated at the waterfront edge. © INJ Architects
The Korean flag analysis: the four trigrams assigned to the development’s programmatic zones, their broken and unbroken line configurations translated into built density and open ratio across the plan. © INJ Architects
The Taeguk diagram overlaid on the site plan: the continuous rotational movement between Yin and Yang visible in the distribution of mass and open space across the coastal ground plane. © INJ Architects
The full development model: the megastructure, the Baywalk, the botanical garden, and the park network held in a single plan whose organizational logic is legible in the Korean flag that generated it. © INJ Architects
The megastructure in vertical section: the balance between housing above and commercial below, the Yang mass rising from the Yin ground plane of the coastal promenade. © INJ Architects

The Old Hanglas proposal belongs to a body of work at INJ Architects in which a place’s own cultural and symbolic systems become the primary generative material for its architecture — an approach in which the design is derived from where it is built rather than imported into it. The methodology governing this research-driven planning process is detailed in how-we-work. For municipalities and developers seeking urban development proposals grounded in the same depth of cultural and environmental analysis, the engagement framework is outlined in bespoke-architecture.