Seoul Urban Womb
The new Women and Family Complex Facility will be a space where relationship among family and households of women will be enhanced.
Women and Family Complex Facility
Team: Irgen Salianji, Marina Kounavi, Karolina Szóstkiewicz, Antony Laurijsen, Stavria Psomiadi
Cityscape
The site is located at Daebang-dong, where U.S. army base ‘Camp Grey’ had been located for 55 years until the retrocession in 2007. Located adjacent to this site was Seoul Women Shelter which accommodated prostitutes, runaway dementia elders, and vagrants from 1962 to 1998. The shelter was converted to Seoul Women Plaza. This is a symbolic place where tragic division of the Korean peninsula, poverty and hardships of woman in the era is intactly accumulated and conveys the agony of Korean modern history. It is purpose of this competition to turn this gloomy and ‘deathlike’ space into a place of resurrection,
Statement
The new Women and Family Complex Facility will be a space where relationship among family and households of women will be enhanced. The organization will face age-old unresolved issues with new experimental thinking and interesting methods. The issues tackled will include collapse of social relation network, lack of communication among family members, 1 person household, women’s low participation on economic activities which stagnated for 20 years and stagnant of gender inference.
“We shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us,” As the statement indicates, it is very crucial that the new spatial composition of Space Salim inspires citizen’s participation and enforces accumulation of relational network, added to programs and operation system. Imagine a space where you are encouraged to meet each other, helps to form creative culture and learn customs of community, and expands value of gender equality in family and community.
