Gildong Chaeum
This project was to place electric car charging stations and cultural and commercial functions on the site of a gas station in the past, and to create a cultural charging station by proposing a new life cycle.
The charging time of an electric car is 30 minutes at the most. During the design period, customers considered various cultural and commercial programs, but people would experience the space for less than 30 minutes of charging time. The half-hour wait given to busy modern people, we saw it as a time to experience the light of nature. Thirty minutes is enough time to experience natural light and its changes. Open spaces, iron, and concrete walls were properly arranged to experience light, shade, and silence throughout the interior and exterior. The use of artificial light was restrained. Iron and concrete are neutral materials suitable for experiencing light and space. Even for a short time, it was aimed to be a time to experience light and space here and discover time to relax.
The new appearance of this place, as the gas station did, was considered to be more appropriate for an open platform-like space rather than an architecture with an interior. The construction was completed with horizontal concrete slabs with no finish and a vertical core of stairs and elevators, and the outer skin was finished with a bent aluminum perforated plate. It was to look like an open structure like a train platform or a vertical square. The aluminum perforated plate with certain holes make the inner windows disappear due to the effects of light and shadow when viewed from the outside. Inside, it acts like a thin curtain to control sunlight. Platform architecture created in this way is more appropriate to induce and transform interesting functions according to the new life cycles than to settle fixed functions like existing architecture types.
The landscape was intended to create an untamed, primitive natural landscape rather than a garden grown by humans using reeds and bamboo-like plants. The shape of primitive nature is the most eco-friendly landscape that have not been passed through human hands. It tried to show that gas stations were not replaced by private buildings through iron and concrete structures in harmony with primitive nature, but maintained open or public characteristics such as stations.
As a result, Gil-dong Chaeum is a cultural transformation of gas stations due to changes in the transportation system from fossil fuel to eco-friendly fuel, and has continuity with past gas stations. Therefore, this is the litmus test paper of civilization that shows the change. SK Networks assumed that each gas station would be transformed like this, and Gil-dong was the first store to change. However, this project was the first and last since SK Networks sold its gas station business. We should keep an eye on how many gas stations in our city will change in the future.
