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The Flow of Life

This work explores an attitude towards accepting death within everyday urban life. Death is an inevitable experience for everyone, yet contemporary cities offer few spaces where loss, grief, and reflection can be acknowledged in daily life. Rather than treating death as something separate from life, this project proposes architecture as a medium through which life and death can be understood as continuous and deeply connected conditions.

The project is sited in the unused space beneath Dongjak Bridge in Seoul. The Han River is one of Seoul’s representative urban and cultural public spaces, yet parts of it remain isolated and overlooked. Although the bridges across the Han River and their under-spaces appear to connect, in reality they often serve only as routes of passage, creating another form of disconnection. Through the space beneath Dongjak Bridge, this project connects two separated urban fabrics through the flow of people, transforming a space of passage into a place for staying and contemplation.

Based on a symmetrical structure, the space unfolds through three spatial sequences. People enter along a gently sloped approach, encounter water, and gradually become immersed in the space. They then follow different routes, encountering others or experiencing moments of solitary reflection.

The water placed throughout the project and the open horizon create distinct spatial atmospheres beneath the bridge, forming conditions where people can pause and reflect. Parts of the space shift with the river’s water level, allowing the architecture to operate not as a fixed object, but as a place that responds to the conditions of the river. After passing through open spaces, one reaches darker areas where light, water, and sightlines are carefully controlled, and the space takes on an unfamiliar atmosphere.

The subway crossing Dongjak Bridge casts repeated patterns of light beneath it, while sound and light shift momentarily with each passing train. As these movements of the city overlap with the sound of water, people repeat walking and pausing, each encountering life and death in their own way.

Format
Typology
Program
Site
Year
Coordinate

Architectural Design
Public
Park
Dongjak Bridge, Seoul, South Korea
2021
(17, 12)