Are public facilities truly mixed-use under one roof?

Lim Yeong-hwan 

The author is the dean of Hongik University's Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design and a professor of architecture.

The word “complex” appears in the names of new public facilities. Community service centers now contain small libraries, while larger welfare facilities may include swimming pools. Libraries share buildings with gyms, and daycare centers with senior centers. Facilities once built separately are increasingly gathered under one roof.

The reasons are practical. Urban land is expensive, public sites are limited and fiscal burdens are growing even as citizens demand more diverse services. Combining facilities allows them to share parking lots and mechanical rooms. Residents also gain the convenience of accessing multiple services in one place.

Policy accelerated the trend. The government’s 2019 three-year plan for “living SOC,” or social overhead capital for everyday life, promoted mixed-use development. Sejong has built community complexes combining administrative offices, libraries, sports and cultural facilities since its early development. Such integration is now less a fad than a rational response to urban constraints.

But putting several public facilities in one building does not automatically create a good complex. Keep adding a gym, pool, welfare center and cultural space to a community center, and the building quickly becomes enormous. If the logic is simply, “Since we are building one anyway, let’s add this too,” integration can become little more than compressed packaging of public services.

Combining different functions is harder than it sounds. Operating hours and management bodies differ. A library’s need for quiet conflicts with gym noise. Parking and circulation can become problematic. Poorly integrated facilities may occupy one building while maintaining separate entrances, operations and users. Architecturally, they are one structure, but functionally they remain separate facilities placed side by side.

Building efficiency does not necessarily mean urban efficiency. Consolidating facilities scattered across neighborhoods may turn a library once five minutes away on foot into one requiring a bus ride. While one impressive complex is created, points of access to public services across the city may actually diminish.

While studying in the United States, I often visited a neighborhood library near my home. Stopping by after work to borrow books or stay until closing became routine. Similar libraries filled neighboring communities. Their greatest virtue was not size but proximity.

Integration and dispersion are not opposites. Dispersion brings public services closer to daily life, while integration can connect different facilities and activities. Some services work best when small and distributed. Others create greater value when brought together.

Time matters as much as space. Public buildings stand for decades, but the programs inside them rarely have the same lifespan. A neighborhood full of young children today may be dominated by older residents 20 years from now. A facility in short supply now may not remain so.

For a public building expected to last 50 years, planners must consider not only today’s needs but future change.

Contemporary shopping malls offer useful lessons. As online shopping has become routine, malls invest in common areas alongside retail space. Some put noncommercial spaces at their center, such as Starfield Library at COEX, while devoting space to exhibitions, performances, gardens and plazas. Such spaces draw people in, encourage them to stay and ultimately enhance the value of the mall.

Public complexes should work similarly. Focusing only on securing the required floor area for each facility misses the benefits of integration. The spaces between facilities can be as important as the facilities themselves. In common areas belonging to no single institution, different users and programs can intersect, generating activities that individual facilities could not create alone.

Sendai Mediatheque, designed by Japanese architect Toyo Ito, demonstrates this potential. It contains a library, galleries and media functions, but what is most compelling is how spaces loosen the boundaries among them. Areas not assigned rigid functions connect different activities and can be used in ways not initially anticipated.

Such flexibility also allows spaces to acquire new purposes over time. If uses and boundaries are not fixed too rigidly, programs can share spaces or adapt them as needs change. A good public complex may not be one that fills every corner with today’s requirements, but one that leaves room for tomorrow over the decades ahead as well.

What deserves caution, then, is not integration itself but the assumption that it is always the answer. The appropriate size, location and combination of public facilities should vary with a city’s scale, density, demographics and lifestyles. The question is not simply how efficiently one building can be filled, but what changes when functions coexist and how facilities should be distributed across the city.

Putting services under one roof is only the beginning of integration, not its completion. The questions now are how to connect them and how to leave room for change.