Contemporary urban office architecture is increasingly expected to function not merely as a physical container for corporate work, but as a complex experiential infrastructure that mediates users’ everyday lives and the image of the city. However, m...
Contemporary urban office architecture is increasingly expected to function not merely as a physical container for corporate work, but as a complex experiential infrastructure that mediates users’ everyday lives and the image of the city. However, many high-rise office buildings along Seoul’s Gangnam-daero corridor still prioritize leasing efficiency and repetitive typical floors, and thus fail to actively organize interior sensory experience. Despite being a key urban axis where brand, retail, and business programs are densely concentrated, lower-level commercial zones and upper office floors often remain monotonously segregated in a vertical manner. As a result, these buildings repeat a façade-driven office tower typology that neither accommodates the city’s layered rhythms nor realizes its sensory potential. Recognizing these limitations, this study aims to propose a design alternative that reconfigures a Gangnam-daero office building as a multisensory architecture capable of mediating the city and user experience.
Gangnam is a representative axis of brand experience where flagship stores and experience-oriented commercial facilities have clustered and cultivated brand identity and consumer experience through multisensory staging. Focusing on flagship stores in the Gangnam area, this study empirically evaluated—through surveys and SPSS analyses—the relationship between multisensory environments (vision, hearing, smell, and touch) and brand-experience satisfaction, defined by coherence, immersion, and revisit intention. The results indicate that higher multisensory levels are associated with reduced sensory imbalance and simultaneous increases in coherence, immersion, and revisit intention. Sensory imbalance showed a weak negative relationship primarily with revisit intention, confirming a sequential structure linking experience, immersion, and behavior. These findings suggest that effective design lies not in intensifying individual sensory stimuli, but in orchestrating a balanced and integrated experiential narrative across the four senses, thereby demonstrating the need for holistic multisensory design that avoids excessive sensory dominance. These analytical results provide important implications for office design along Gangnam-daero. Building on the concepts of multisensory level and sensory imbalance derived from flagship store cases, as well as the confirmed experience–immersion–behavior sequence, this study seeks to move beyond the conventional model of vertically segregated lower-level retail and repetitive upper office floors. Instead, it reconstitutes the entire building as a “vertical ground” that mediates multisensory experience across all levels. Multisensory design strategies—through light, sound, and materials—are applied not only to the lower and middle floors, but also to the upper office levels. By applying multisensory experience research to office architecture, this study proposes a future-oriented office prototype that integrates urban context, brand character, and work environment. It presents a design scenario for transforming the façade-centered office towers repeatedly found along Gangnam-daero into a three-dimensional experiential field that mediates users’ senses, everyday life, and the city’s rhythm. Furthermore, it offers sustainable design guidelines that may inform future planning of hybrid high-rise buildings and the ongoing reconfiguration of the Gangnam corridor.