The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) has unveiled an ambitious hillside redevelopment project in Busan, South Korea, that challenges conventional approaches to urban housing on steep terrain. The Busan Slope Housing project represents a comprehensive strategy to address the complex topographical and social challenges facing the city's historic hillside neighborhoods, which have served as vital residential areas since the Korean War era.
Developed in partnership with the Busan Architecture Festival and the Department of Housing and Architecture, the project explores innovative alternatives to the typical high-rise estate developments that have increasingly replaced traditional hillside communities. Rather than imposing uniform tower blocks that ignore the natural landscape, OMA's approach emphasizes a flexible, context-responsive framework that integrates contemporary housing needs with the existing spatial and social fabric of these historic areas.
The hillsides of Busan hold profound historical significance, having originally served as refuge areas for displaced populations during the Korean War. These communities developed organically using salvaged materials and adapted ingeniously to the challenging steep terrain, creating dense, resilient neighborhoods that became integral to the city's urban identity. Over decades, these informal settlements evolved into vibrant communities with strong social networks and unique spatial characteristics that reflected their residents' resourcefulness and adaptability.
However, as these aging neighborhoods face mounting challenges related to deteriorating infrastructure, limited accessibility, and insufficient capacity for modern living standards, city planners have increasingly turned to wholesale redevelopment through high-rise construction. While these new developments offer improved spatial efficiency and contemporary amenities, they often disrupt the original topography and erase the informal, community-driven networks that once defined life on the slopes, raising questions about the preservation of neighborhood character and social cohesion.
OMA's proposal focuses on two contrasting sites that serve as testing grounds for their innovative approach: Yeongju, strategically located in Busan's city center, and Anchang, situated between forested ridgelines in a more natural setting. These differing urban contexts provide valuable opportunities to develop and test a reproducible redevelopment strategy that successfully mediates between the fine-grained fabric of informal settlements and the larger scale requirements of modern housing estates.
A key innovation in OMA's design is its emphasis on circulation as the primary organizing element for the entire development. The architects have created an extensive pedestrian network that thoughtfully connects public nodes, bus stops, monorail stations, schools, markets, parks, and cultural landmarks throughout the hillside terrain. This comprehensive circulation framework ensures that daily life can flow seamlessly across the slopes while maintaining accessibility and connectivity between different areas of the development.
This circulation-focused approach reveals what OMA describes as natural "pocket neighborhoods" that emerge organically from the site's topographical characteristics. These neighborhoods are shaped by multiple factors including gradient variations, accessibility requirements, adjacency relationships, and strategic view corridors. Within these carefully planned clusters, the architects have negotiated several key spatial trade-offs that are essential to successful hillside development.
These critical design decisions include balancing slope retention against vehicle access requirements, optimizing views while ensuring adequate daylight penetration, and weighing the benefits of shared landings against more granular individual entries. Through this careful analysis and design process, OMA has developed four distinct housing typologies that respond to different site conditions and resident needs: terrace housing, urban villas, row housing, and towers.
Each housing typology has been rigorously tested for its adaptability to various slope conditions, solar access requirements, optimal orientation, and proximity to public spaces. The resulting architectural composition strategically places towers on the highest points of the site to maximize views and minimize ground coverage, positions villas in central nodes to serve as community focal points, arranges row houses along ridges to follow natural contours, and embeds terraces in steeper areas where they can work with rather than against the natural topography.
Rather than proposing a uniform urban model that could be applied anywhere, OMA's strategy represents a genuinely context-sensitive approach that results in a carefully orchestrated patchwork of interrelated zones. Each zone responds to its specific site conditions while contributing to the overall coherence of the development. Through the thoughtful planning of stairs, landings, terraces, and small community squares, the design transforms necessary circulation infrastructure into vibrant communal spaces.
This innovative approach to circulation and community space aims to maintain and enhance the informal, social connectivity that originally defined the hillside communities, ensuring that new development preserves rather than destroys the social fabric that makes these neighborhoods special. The project demonstrates how contemporary architecture can honor historical patterns while meeting modern needs for safety, accessibility, and comfort.
The Busan Slope Housing project comes at a time of significant architectural activity in South Korea. The Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism recently opened its fifth edition under the direction of renowned designer Thomas Heatherwick, running through November 18. Additionally, at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, the Korean Pavilion is marking its 30th anniversary with "Little Toad, Little Toad: Unbuilding Pavilion," commissioned by Arts Council Korea and curated by the Curating Architecture Collective. Meanwhile, Foster + Partners has also unveiled its proposed design for IOTA Seoul I, a major new mixed-use development in Seoul, indicating the continued international interest in Korean architectural projects.
