Urban Aquaculture — Vertical Fish Farm & Housing

Outcome. Proposed a vertical fish farming facility at Seoul’s Eungbong Rainwater Pump Station — where aquaculture tanks, residential units, a market, and research labs form a circular production-consumption system embedded in existing urban infrastructure.

Role: Team of 3 · Dates: Fall 2023 · Context: Interior Architecture Studio 2 · Tools: Grasshopper, Rhino, AutoCAD

Site & Brief

The Eungbong Rainwater Pump Station sits along the Han River — a piece of urban infrastructure designed to collect, filter, and redirect stormwater. The studio brief asked: how can existing city systems become the foundation for new living?

The site was chosen for its direct relationship to Seoul’s water network. Rather than treating the pump station as an obstacle, the project treats it as a generator — its infrastructure logic extended upward into a new building.

Concept

Conventional fish farming is efficient but isolated — production and consumption are separated by geography and logistics. This project collapses that gap.

Organic aquaculture volumes thread through the building’s floors, sitting alongside dwelling units, a ground-floor market, and upper-level research labs. Residents live above the source of their food. Rainwater collected by the pump station below feeds directly into the fish tanks above. Waste water cycles back through filtration and returns to the Han River — cleaner than it arrived.

The formal logic is deliberate: the structural grid is orthogonal, reading as a conventional urban building from the outside. Inside, the tank volumes are amorphous — shaped by biological need and circulation, not by module. The tension between the two is the architecture.

Drawings