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Architects: Another D Studio
- Area: 360 m²
- Year: 2022
Text description provided by the architects. The middle of Euljiro is a chaos densely packed with many stores, factories, and people, and it is also a sort of boot camp for those who wish to work closely in the manufacturing field. As such, the Euljiro area has been a home for many small and medium-sized businesses covering all sorts of manufacturing industries since the 1960s. Among them, the back alleys of Euljiro and Chungmuro, which are called printing alleys, have been crowded with such businesses especially those related to printing and paper since the late 1960s. And in the 80s, which was its prime era, it had about 1,500 businesses running and was Korea’s biggest Mecca for printing.
Although the paper age has declined and the scale has shrunk considerably, a considerable amount of people remain and are still holding the fort down. In such a place, we wanted to give a moment of ‘genuine rest’ to comfort the body and mind by escaping from the daily life filled with the sounds of machines and people. The mechanism of rest we defined was to give a break to the body's senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.
The land of Euljiro that was given to us was a low ocher hill, and when the sunset came, the hill turned a bronze color, and it is said that it was called ‘Gurigae’, which means copper hill. We went back in time and drew the scene of this place through our imagination, the serenity of the sunset shining down on those who lived another restless day. We wanted to bring back and restore the scent of ‘the soil’ and the memories of ‘the hill’ to those who worked hard today.
