The National Museum of World Writing is planned as a horizontal urban mass, echoing the surrounding Incheon towers, while inverting their dimensions. The design aims to create museum spaces that are responsive to the urban context and in harmony with the natural conditions of the park. A public urban passage interconnects the building at ground level with the main boulevard, promenade, park and waterside lake. Visitors can access the transparent ground level public Cultural and Educational spaces as well as the Performance spaces in the landscape, all working together to enhance the experience of interacting with world writing in its many facets.

The building unfolds around a Larchivium, a recurring programmatic element that combines the functions – Library, Archive & Museum in diverse combinations dependent upon the context within the building. The Larchivium invites visitors to See, Feel, Read and Experience the diverse writing Artifacts and Media in a personal way.

There are three main Larchivium spaces. The Main Atrium Larchivium Wall ascends from the underground archive creating a vertically movable display that is visible from all floors by all visitors entering the museum. The Larchivium Wall is a multifunctional entity, showcasing physical artifacts, enabling banner cover and digital media projections on its opacity-changeable glass envelope. The Reading Area Larchivium is an intimate showcase in which multi lingual books can be touched and read by the public. The Permanent Exhibition Larchivium is an experience space within the permanent gallery that can be entered, ascended and engaged with by exhibition goers.

The buildings’ mass is composed of two envelopes. The ground level transparent envelope of the museum attracts visitors via its visual and physical accessibility. The above façade is a double skin light responsive sustainable façade, clad with unique embedded concrete Character elements specially developed for the project. The repetition and combination of these character elements create patterns of void and matter that refer to the repetition of vowels and consonants common to all human language, in all its diversity.