REST by Pezo von Ellrichshausen at Medongaule Garden in South Korea dissolves the boundary between building and ground—sixteen concrete columns becoming vertical landscape.
At the edge of a protected forest in Gyeonggi-do, where the Medongaule botanical garden unfolds across cultivated terrain, a restaurant emerges not so much built upon the land as grown from it. The Chilean practice Pezo von Ellrichshausen, known for their monolithic concrete volumes and careful sectional play, arrived at something both monumental and strangely vegetal—architecture that reads simultaneously as ruin and as organism.
The building's logic begins with sixteen rectangular columns arranged in a strict grid, each one inhabitable rather than merely structural. These vertical elements—clad in soft green-tinted concrete, dark oak, and terrazzo—contain the restaurant's service spaces while defining the voids between them for dining. The effect resembles a forest of constructed trees, their canopies merging overhead into a continuous ceiling plane.
Three distinct horizontal layers respond to the site's topography. Below grade, a specialized kitchen operates invisibly, its presence announced only by the aromas that rise through the structure. At ground level, the column grid creates a permeable threshold between garden and interior. Above, the roof plane hovers as a unifying gesture, its underside forming ceilings of varying height as the terrain shifts beneath.
The material palette reinforces the sense of geological emergence. The green concrete tint suggests oxidation, as if the structure had been present long enough to acquire patina. Oak surfaces warm the harder elements without softening the overall severity. Terrazzo floors continue the mineral logic, their aggregate composition echoing the gravel paths that wind through the surrounding garden.
What Pezo von Ellrichshausen have achieved is a kind of architectural photosynthesis—a building that appears to draw sustenance from its context rather than merely occupying it. Diners seated among the columns experience both shelter and exposure, contained yet porous. The forest beyond the glazing reads as continuation rather than contrast. REST earns its name not through the absence of activity but through the presence of something calmer: architecture at peace with its ground.
