The tendency of people to stay in or near their homes has increased since the pandemic started early last year. Residents’ needs to do everything “at home” has expanded to outdoor spaces around the living space. This in turn has led to a greater importance of good landscaping in apartment complexes.
The Samsung C&T Engineering & Construction (E&C) Group recently won the “Grand Prize” in the 2021 Asia Design Prize for its “piloti garden,” a landscaped outdoor space, at Raemian Leaders One apartment complex. Let’s look at this piloti garden that received a prestigious global award given to only the top 1%.
Piloti garden of Raemian Leaders One
Some buildings sit fully or partially raised atop pillars, columns, or walls. These are called piloti, and many apartments constructed in Korea recently have incorporated piloti on the ground floor. A space created by piloti is both partly indoors and outdoors at the same time, where people can feel a pleasant breeze under shade. However, it has often been used as simply a passageway or bicycle storage.
Samsung C&T has thought about how to use piloti differently as a shared space where residents actually want to sit and relax. The result is the “piloti garden,” a rest area that integrates and connects the piloti and the outdoor landscaped garden.
In 2018, Samsung C&T announced its “edge garden” strategy for Raemian’s landscaping products, out of which grew the piloti garden type. By creating a garden adjacent to the piloti, which form an edge between a building and the landscaping around it, the boundary is removed or at least blurred.
By blocking some sources of stress from outside the apartment complex, a piloti garden establishes a space where people can experience the beauty of nature. The first realization of such a garden was in the Raemian Riocent complex, completed in 2019.
What makes the piloti garden at Raemian Leaders One so special?
There are a number of features that distinguish the piloti garden at Raemian Leaders One from previous iterations created at other Raemian apartment complexes.
First, at Leaders One, different piloti gardens are created for every apartment building in the complex, each with a different design. Taking into account the size and characteristics of each space, the common elements such as canopies, pergolas, and benches are employed differently to create a unique sense of space in which residents can relax.
Also, the piloti gardens at Leaders One are integrated and associated with a building; they are not simply green spaces made into gardens. By connecting those spaces, residents can feel and experience the inside and outside of piloti.
From the early stage of building design, architecture and landscaping teams cooperated in order to give a single identity to the areas inside and outside the piloti. For instance, the same pattern is used on the wall in the piloti and on the decorations outside, and the same materials and lighting atmosphere are used in both the external garden and the ceiling and walls of the space created by the piloti.
In all 12 piloti gardens at Raemian Leaders One there are waterscape features designed to decrease both sight and sound from outside the apartment complex. Each building had a different completion date, so the waterscape features were installed separately to match that schedule, in 12 individual processes. Gazing upon the outdoor vista while resting within the piloti, residents can feel like they are enjoying a landscape painting in their own private space.
To sum up, the piloti gardens at Raemian Leaders One is the project that epitomizes Raemian’s landscaping abilities.
Commenting on the direction of Raemian’s landscaping this year, Park Yoo-jung, director of Residential Division (Landscape Group) at Samsung C&T E&C Group, said, “Gardens designed differently for each apartment building will evolve much in 2021. Also, as people’s yearning for nature grows, we will focus on realizing nature as it is. Our concept of piloti gardens, removing the boundary between a building and landscaping, will expand to take advantage of spaces that connect a structure to the land, such as retaining walls.”
As always, landscaping at Raemian apartments has broken the existing mold and provided new value. As Raemian has made the piloti into a space where people can intermingle with family and neighbors, we will look forward to other gardens that Raemian will show in the years to come.
