Platform Anchoring

The study focus on traffic infrastructure which tend to be left as an isolated unconfirmed zone by urban sprawl caused in the rapid urbanization, as a potential places for users to create new and various communities. the project aims at expanding the existing platform in physical and psycho-cultural sense, and recreating a new socio-cultural platforms.

The site (Dong-jak station) acts not as a single fixed site but as a urban device that becomes the center of the infra-structural network surrounding the site. In the past(Choseon Dynasty), the site had been used as the Dong-Jak ferry. The function as the river transportation center in the past has evolved into that of modern transportation. The complex of modern transportation network had eradicated the past memories of trade, daily life, and shared value happened around the Dong-Jak ferry in the past, and left the site a so called No-Mans-Land in the city; that is, a land without a sense of place.\nThis project introduces a new concept of urban design, based on the characteristics of boundary, platform, and stratum inherited in the site, through an interpretation of the site that is an another level of no-man’s-land created by the modern city, as a birthplace of a new civilization that responds to the local community. By using simple loading-unloading space of platforms as a device to encourage participation and communication of users, the traffic network system acts as a platform to share and provide new value and experience to citizens. Preventing the subway station from being recognized as an indeterminate public space of the city, the project aims at proposing a new type of subway station that acts as an architectural artifact transforming the urban delivery routes into architectural experience through a planar and cross-sectional relationship with the adjacent contexts. The platform space is re-created as a new social and cultural platform through human and physical expansion. In addition, to reproduce the properties of the land symbolically and to give the identity of the place, the station is assembled into a Pod shape, which leads to the diversification of the systems and the linkage between programs through a morphological combination. The word POD means a cocoon, a amniotic membrane containing a child, which contains something in the past. By constructing existing circulations through the Pod structure, users can experience various programs provided by the platform by penetrating each POD.