A Department Store With a Weather System

Most department stores install a fountain.
LOTTE built one through four floors.
Aqua Mall forms part of LOTTE Department Store Gwangbok in Busan, a vast seaside retail complex whose completed department-store component reached approximately 162,483 square meters. Its central void was organized around the Aquatique Show: a water installation roughly 21 meters high whose central jet reached 18.2 meters, earning Guinness World Records recognition for the tallest indoor music fountain. Water, projection, music and movement turned the atrium into something retail architecture rarely becomes—a scheduled public event. YNA
But a show lasting minutes leaves a building that must work all day.
That is where the architectural problem becomes more interesting. GUY approached Aqua Mall not as a shopping center with entertainment added to it, but as a public interior in which retail, circulation, water, light, landscape, graphics and spectacle could reinforce one another. The spaces surrounding the attraction needed to remain convincing before the first jet fired and after the music stopped. The spectacle could be enormous. The architecture still needed restraint.
The result reflects the territory in which GUY has spent decades working: the increasingly narrow space between architecture and entertainment. Retail planning has to work. Circulation has to be obvious. Branding has to sell. The public space has to survive enormous traffic. And somewhere inside all that practicality there still has to be a moment that makes somebody look up.
Aqua Mall demonstrates why multidisciplinary design matters. When architecture becomes theater, graphics become wayfinding, water becomes media and a department store becomes a destination, separating the disciplines stops making much sense.

“Art should astonish, transmute, transfix.”
— Brett Whiteley DatoCMS