In line with the Seoul Metropolitan Government’s 2040 Urban Master Plan which aims to realize the “Southwestern New Growth Innovation Axis,” Seoul Startup Hub Guro is an institution planned to operate as an “advanced manufacturing startup hub” encompassing the entire cycle from idea creation to production, distribution, and international expansion. The design competition brief required the hub not only to serve as an industrial facility but also to enhance local identity and present an architectural vision for industrial development. In response, Junglim Architecture proposed the concept “INNO FACTORY,” envisioning the hub as both a startup platform that generates innovation and an industrial renovation hub reinterpreting the industrial district’s heritage. This signifies a complex transformation that goes beyond physical regeneration to embrace startup culture and the urban context.

The sculptural mass, condensing the industrial archive of the Guro area, reinterprets the structural vocabulary of its former industrial district in a contemporary way, while the materiality of exposed concrete and the texture of the façade’s metal structure sensually express a spatiotemporal transition by capturing the traces of industry and the layered passage of time. Common spaces on each floor are designed in the Open Lab format, functioning as networking zones that foster interaction among companies and responding to both the rapidly-transforming industrial structure toward advanced manufacturing and the uncertainties of the future. Green features like passive design, daylighting, and ventilation systems are structural innovations to lay the foundation for a sustainable startup ecosystem. Through this design proposal, the aim was to present a new prototype of a future-oriented startup cluster that merges urban regeneration with technology-based entrepreneurship, creating a new prototype for sustainable urban development.