The mirrorball cracked: this standard spec office block on a Seoul business park is transformed by a shimmering, prismatic, mirror-glass skin.

Business parks the world over have many things in common, notably banality. In most cases, the architectural results of this form of commercial entrepreneurship are dire, with any traces of individuality ruthlessly obliterated. Unimaginative urban plans predominate, populated by blocks of overpowering uniformity, usually wrapped in monotonous curtain wall facades. The Digital Media City (DMC) in the north of Seoul, not far from the former World Cup Stadium, is a case in point. Though not yet fully developed, it shows all the hallmarks of an indistinctive sprawl of high-rise blocks, so the potential for exceptional architecture is necessarily limited. Yet in this apparent wasteland, Singaporean developer Pramerica has made a powerful architectural statement with its first speculative office building by Berlin-based architects Barkow Leibinger, who are also former Emerging Architecture winners (AR December 2001).

DMC B6/2 Office Building (as it is prosaically known) contains 20000sqm of space for approximately 700 employees. This is divided over 11 storeys of offices and showrooms, together with a roof garden and five levels of underground car parking facilities. Plot size and the footprint of this almost exactly square building (35m x 35m) is also regular. But this is where the conformity ends. In a remarkable act of architectural autonomy, Barkow Leibinger step outside the norm on this tightly restricted plot. With barely 3m distance between the new building and its neighbours, they define their own architectural hemisphere within an otherwise confined and arid terrain. As contextual cues were virtually non-existent, the architects worked from inside out. In order to maximise space on the ground floor (to accommodate a column-free, 8m high showroom space for a German machine tool manufacturer), the core was not located centrally, but in the eastern corner. For structural reasons it was cast in reinforced concrete and its outside walls covered in black zinc shingles to make an explicit contrast with the otherwise dominant structural glazing. All the remaining office floors are open plan and executed in a conventional steel frame with a 16m clear span.

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So far the clearly orthogonal and rational plan, with the exception of the indented and triangulated entrance to the lobby, falls within the rigid guidelines set by the business park's management. But a dramatic contrast is introduced in the treatment of the main glass facade. Here, all attempts to accommodate convention and rationality are metaphorically shattered. Plans and sections give little hint of the surprising secret of the building's outstanding three-dimensional envelope of mirrored fractal glass. And so a different sense of order is introduced and suddenly the building is quite the opposite from a steady, static and orthogonal frame.

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A cacophony of visual splinters fractures the external skin which warps and protrudes at razor sharp angles. Two basic types of floor-to-ceiling windows, one in two dimensions, the other in three, were developed with Arup Facades in Berlin and Hong Kong. The three-dimensional panel is rotated by 180 degrees every other window and the entire facade geometry is moved on by one window frame at each new floor, creating the inimitable prismatic shiver that runs over the building. From a constructional viewpoint, though individual window frames may appear bewildering in their complex totality, they are in fact customised and standardised using standard aluminium extrusions. Still, such a unique facade could not have been built without exceptional design input and the latest CNC saw cutting. Alutek manufactured the four-way joints that hold the all glued Viracon glass in place with the greatest precision.

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Like a shocking mirrored blizzard, the B6/2 Building blasts over the tepid landscape of the Digital Media City, gloriously subverting the formal order. Barkow Leibinger have hijacked dull convention by implanting an architectural Trojan horse. Any impression of regular structural glazing is shattered to smithereens and the entire character of the building's skin takes on new and dramatic dimensions. Unexpected reflections of the densely populated and heterogeneous surroundings are mirrored on crisp prisms of the facade. Messages from another world descend on the building as light, clouds, traffic and people move over the angular, reflecting skin. Life in all its facets is mirrored and warped by the kaleidoscopic surfaces and after dark, the building transmutes into a shimmering Chinese lantern.

Seen in the context of Barkow Leibinger's consistently inventive oeuvre, the facade's linear origins betray familiar traits. For instance, in an earlier project for a distribution centre in Ditzingen (AR March 2004), the glass skin is veiled by a fine mesh. In Seoul, however, the facade is turned into an agent provocateur. Outside space is absorbed as part camouflage and part filter to become a fractal topography. Perceived as a vertical landscape, the building constitutes its own little universe. But despite this highly expressionistic feature, worthy of comparison with Bruno Taut's famous Glass Architecture, no mysterious new worlds lie behind its idiosyncratic reflections--just office space. Could this fractured mirrorball be the perfect skin and symbol for the digital world of the twenty-first century? In any case, the DMC and Seoul should relish the presence of such a memorable and mould-breaking new building.

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