"Yeondu," a neighborhood living facility in Seongnae-dong, Gangdong-gu, Seoul, designed by Zaira Architects, has won the Winner prize at the Red Dot Design Award, one of the world's three major design awards. The firm has now produced winning works for two consecutive years, following its KN Global headquarters building last year.
Zaira Architects announced that its Seongnae-dong neighborhood facility Yeondu was selected as a Winner in the architecture category (Architecture / Ready for Market) of the Red Dot Award 2026: Design Concept.
The Red Dot Design Award is an international design prize organized by the Design Center North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. Along with the iF Design Award and the IDEA Design Award, it is considered one of the world's three major design awards.
Yeondu is targeting completion in May next year and is currently under construction, but it earned a place among the winners in recognition of its design quality, feasibility, and architectural value.
The project name carries the meaning of "connecting and rising steeply." It was designed based on the concept of vertically extending the horizontal flow of the surrounding alleys within the building's interior.
The building focuses on emphasizing continuity with the surrounding urban fabric. Each floor's mass is stacked layer by layer, with some parts deliberately offset to create terraces, shade, and gaps for sightlines. Through this, the building was planned to function not as a single independent object but as a "vertically rising alleyway" that extends the alley upward.
For the exterior, concrete long bricks were applied to emphasize horizontal texture, according to the firm. The repeated grain of the material binds the entire building into a single sculptural order, while the recessed facade and terraces form light and shadow, designed to mediate the relationship between city and architecture, interior and exterior.
Zaira Architects also won a Red Dot Design Award Winner prize last year with its KN Global headquarters building. That project was highly praised for expressing the identity of a civil engineering and construction company through the architectural concept of "Concrete Lining."
"If the KN Global headquarters was a work that embodied a company's identity through architecture, Yeondu is a project that translated the rhythm of Seongnae-dong's alleys into a vertical architectural language," said Lee Gyu-bin, CEO of Zaira Architects. "It is especially meaningful that the design itself, not yet completed, was recognized internationally."
Lee graduated from Seoul National University's Department of Architecture and studied under architect Seung H-Sang. He currently lectures at Seoul National University's Department of Architecture. Since founding Zaira Architects in 2022, he has carried out a range of projects spanning private and public architecture.
