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Home / News / Dongdaemun Design Plaza
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Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Seoul: 45,133 aluminium panels, 4mm thick, no two alike.

A free-form building showing that the real limit of aluminium cladding isn’t the material – it’s how you mass-produce thousands of panels while keeping every single shape different.

Reference project — not a Eurowindow project. This article summarises public information from the sources listed at the end, with our own commentary. Images belong to their owners and are embedded directly from Pinterest with a link back to the source.

The project at a glance

Image: Dongdaemun Design Plaza (Zaha Hadid Architects) — see the original pin on Pinterest.

What stands out in the curved aluminium envelope

Per Wikipedia, Dongdaemun Design Plaza was designed by Zaha Hadid with Samoo Architects & Engineers, with construction starting in 2009 and the building officially inaugurated on 21 March 2014, covering 86,574.7 m². The building’s continuously curved form couldn’t be wrapped in standard flat aluminium panels – every point on the envelope has its own curvature.

Per Samsung C&T (the main contractor) and korea.net, the answer was 45,133 aluminium panels, 4mm thick, no two alike, each carrying its own code so it would land in the right spot. British and German aluminium makers had initially estimated that hand-forming every doubly-curved panel could take up to 20 years; Samsung C&T engineers had to develop their own forming and cutting machines to mass-produce the panels while keeping each shape distinct, which led to 6 new patents.

Note: figures come from Wikipedia, Samsung C&T and korea.net; no independent figure is available for the cladding installation timeline alone.

Our take

From the point of view of aluminium cladding for non-linear facades, three lessons stand out:

  1. A continuously curved envelope needs panels calculated point by point, with no repeating “standard” size. When the form has no repeating flat plane, the number of distinct panel shapes can run into the tens of thousands – the challenge is in manufacturing, not design.
  2. Panel thickness alone doesn’t drive complexity – new forming and cutting technology does. 4mm is still a common thickness; the real difference is the machinery built to mass-produce doubly-curved panels.
  3. Every panel needs its own ID to control correct on-site placement. With thousands of uniquely shaped panels, installation has to be tracked panel by panel, not by batch. See Eurowindow aluminium cladding.

If you are weighing options for a high-rise project, send your brief to the Eurowindow technical team to discuss specifics.

Sources

This article is for reference only and does not imply Eurowindow took part in this project. If you own an image or content and would like it changed or removed, please contact sonhn@eurowindow.biz; we will act immediately.