Order Matter shields South Korean housing with "resolute and calm" facade

Architecture studio Order Matter has completed Raw House, a pared-back apartment block designed to shield itself from the bustling streets of Seoul in South Korea.

Raw House is located in a dense neighbourhood of Gangdong-gu and comprises four rental apartments, a street-level cafe and a penthouse that doubles up as a workspace.

As its name suggests, it is built with a material palette of exposed concrete, stone, and timber.

Order Matter Architects, which has offices in London and Seoul, oriented the block to face south, where it overlooks a wooded hillside. Meanwhile, its rear facade is more closed off, intended to act as a “buffer” to the city.

According to Order Matter’s founding director Oliver Chiu, the decision to open the block up to the south draws on cha-gyeong – the traditional Korean concept of borrowing landscape and bringing it into a domestic environment.

“We wanted to offer residents an experience of nature not as a backdrop, but as a spatial and emotional presence,” Chiu told Dezeen.

Inside, communal living spaces and the kitchen face south, while bedrooms are located on the north side, shaded from direct sun.

The studio said the building’s concrete structure helps absorb heat during the day.

The building’s facade has been designed to evoke a sense of calm, with every brick intentionally placed to lose any readable pattern in its composition.

“This allowed the façade to register not as a decorative surface but as a single, quiet mass—resolute and calm,” said Chiu.

This sense of continuity is carried through into the design of the apartment block’s interiors, where joints have been minimised so that stone and timber surfaces appear as “singular masses rather than panels”.

The interiors also include a sparing use of plywood and unfinished concrete walls that are left exposed.

There is a terrace on the fourth floor, hidden behind a perforated-brick wall.

Local planning rules required half of the parapet wall around the terrace to be open, but Order Matter negotiated approval of the perforated brickwork that would meet the regulations while still “visually preserving the building’s mass”.

Other apartment blocks recently featured on Dezeen include a triangular building in Mexico City by CRB Arquitectos and a converted post office in Brittany by Chatillon Architectes.

The photography is by Simone Bossi.

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