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Memorial and Cultural Centre for Victims of Industrial Accidents
Grand Prize at 57th Korea University Annual Architecture Exhibition

- Year: 2021
- Location: Mapo-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea
- Type: Renovation, Landscape Design, Cultural Centre


Back to Home Disclosing the Suppressed Death



The city where we are facing today is untruth. It only pursues reckless development, and a number of monuments make this value solidify with symbolizing only a corporeal development. The envelopes materialized a domination of capitals conceal the truth-the existence who made the structures and sequence of self-understanding to construct it-through closing raw structures and pure spaces. We fulfil the wrong self-understanding in the city, and it will be repeated. This place is untruth. It is the untruth.

The truth we should reveal is the hidden existence, and it is the story about laborers. The fabric of the city is a result from the self-understanding by the laborers who hold a large majority of citizen, and there are sacrifices and deaths in the process. Many elements that introduced as untruth disregard this uncomfortable truth. The devices as propaganda that shows only the visualized advances do not have interests about their lives, rather they make effort to evade them. Displaying the stories about the laborers by eliminating this factor is expressing of wills to revise this wrong formation of relationships. It is the truth.



Seoul Power Plant(Danginri Power Plant) is chosen as the most radical place in Seoul to declare the wills. Seoul Power Plant represented the development of Seoul City called as “Miracle of Hangang” is now prepared to disclose the truth that was hidden, with being stopped generating. For welcoming the switched conditions, various elements would be reinterpreted. Pure structures that consist of the power station show the materialized histories about the laborers with transparent envelope, and new buildings surrounding neighborhood are spatial equipment that help the recovered self-understandings through the formation of relationships with the unveiled truth. Corten Steal shows not previous reckless improvement, but forgotten values with wrapping the new buildings.



The urban contexts surrounding the original power plant also used as instruments to support recovering the self-understanding. Hangang is not the symbol of development called as miracle anymore, but proposed as the purest utopia by eliminating all the partitions. Water is the indication of Hangang that has this characteristic, and not only suggest the finale of the circulation from the site, but also the metaphor of the unstable world and equipment that make visitors reflect themselves before entering the new spaces.






The (main) circulation reads visitors to the truth slowly by a chain of sequence. Exhibition 1 is the place where the histories are reconstituted, and it is expressed by the extruded masses at outside, and oblique axis at inside. Exhibition 2 has spatial metaphor of the unreasonable social structures carrying the sacrifices and deaths of the laborers. At Memorial Zone is the place where the objects used by dead laborers are stacked like storage, and visitors do most active revitalized self-understandings through generalizing themselves to laborers. Exhibition 3 is the cleanest places and end up the circulation.

Various programs placed both sides of the exhibitions support the main circulation and spatial experiences emerged from that. Numerous activities by the laborers to overcome the current condition should be called as “culture”, and Cultural Centre is the facilities containing these activities. Open Archive stores and opens to the public all the histories about that, and has a function protect the proofs related to the laborers; existences.





Seoul Power Plant getting new meaning now stands against to the violence of the city committed even today. Memorial and Cultural Centre for Victims of Industrial Accidents emphasize the necessity of the new formation of relationships at the nearest locations from the citizens. But we should not misunderstand; The ultimate goal of this project is not an ideal status or Laborer-Utopia which all the structural imbalances are resolved. Architecture is too spiritless to be expected to get that kind of power. This project just attempts to change of the understanding of the world of individuals by experiencing the spaces that contains many instruments. Furthermore, it hopes to visitors who get these experiences to be new existences after coming back to city.