A brutalist concrete interior in Seoul with an Essential Metal Kitchen by MMK featuring a 4-meter floating island and concealed floor-to-ceiling storage

CP Project is a Seoul space where architecture and kitchen design were handled by 2 separate studios working in close collaboration. BY ARCHITECTURE designed the overall architecture and interiors, working in raw concrete to create a brutalist shell. MMK (Museum of Modern Kitchen) designed and produced the kitchen and furniture, including the piece that anchors the space: an Essential Metal Kitchen built around a 4-meter metal island.

The island appears to float, suspended at both ends without visible support. The effect is produced by embedded floor piping that reinforces the structure while remaining out of sight. The engineering disappears so that the form can read as a single uninterrupted horizontal plane sitting within the concrete space. Metal surfaces throughout the kitchen respond to the concrete walls and ceiling, complementing rather than competing with the raw material character of the shell.

Vertical storage runs the height of the space, where towering cabinets meet the ceiling. These units conceal a refrigerator behind metal cladding and include a hidden door connecting interior and exterior spaces. The integration follows a logic that goes back at least to Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's 1926 Frankfurt Kitchen, where concealment and efficiency were treated as primary design principles rather than afterthoughts. Here the same logic is applied within a much larger and more raw architectural frame, with the kitchen sitting as a precise metallic insertion within the concrete volume that surrounds it.