Portal to Selectable Reality
Does preserving historic architecture mean maintaining its existing form?
Yongsan Railroad Hospital explores adaptive reuse as a means of connecting the physical traces and collective memory of a historic building with new forms of social participation. Working with the existing hospital, the project questions how architecture inherited from the past can acquire a new role within the contemporary city.
A crowdfunding and public participation platform is introduced as a new program, allowing people to propose, select, and participate in the realization of ideas. Preserved architectural elements and new spatial interventions reveal different layers of time, creating an experience in which historical memory intersects with unrealized possibilities.
The project understands preservation not as the act of fixing a building in its past condition, but as a continuing process through which existing architecture can accommodate new uses, relationships, and meanings.
The relationship between the hospital and unrealized ideas was mapped along two axes—past and future, physical and virtual. The sequence of online funding was translated into introduction, display, testing, discussion, and public presentation, establishing the order of movement before new rooms or objects were designed.
A linear wall threads through the preserved complex and acts as both route and measuring device. New volumes attach to it as legible interventions, while portals mark shifts between existing fabric, physical prototypes, and projected possibilities.
Does preserving historic architecture mean maintaining its existing form?
Yongsan Railroad Hospital explores adaptive reuse as a means of connecting the physical traces and collective memory of a historic building with new forms of social participation. Working with the existing hospital, the project questions how architecture inherited from the past can acquire a new role within the contemporary city.
A crowdfunding and public participation platform is introduced as a new program, allowing people to propose, select, and participate in the realization of ideas. Preserved architectural elements and new spatial interventions reveal different layers of time, creating an experience in which historical memory intersects with unrealized possibilities.
The project understands preservation not as the act of fixing a building in its past condition, but as a continuing process through which existing architecture can accommodate new uses, relationships, and meanings.
The relationship between the hospital and unrealized ideas was mapped along two axes—past and future, physical and virtual. The sequence of online funding was translated into introduction, display, testing, discussion, and public presentation, establishing the order of movement before new rooms or objects were designed.
A linear wall threads through the preserved complex and acts as both route and measuring device. New volumes attach to it as legible interventions, while portals mark shifts between existing fabric, physical prototypes, and projected possibilities.
