光之舞 | 首尔车站冥想空间

Firm： NARUSE INOKUMA ARCHITECTS

Type： Commercial › Shopping Mall

STATUS： Built

YEAR： 2019

A Meditation of Light in Everyday Life

This work was realized through an international competition held as part of a public arts project implemented by the city of Seoul from 2016. The area next to our site was used for a long period of time as a foreign army base. In 2017, it was announced that it would be transformed into a park for the people. We therefore wanted to create a bright, gentle space for meditation in this station that would honor this region’s forthcoming future and hope for peace.

To be more precise, what we created was a huge, white dome made of expanded metal hung within the station’s atrium. Direct light from the skylight lights up a portion of the dome and bleeds out. It creeps slowly throughout the space along with the passage of time. At times, it gives the entire dome a soft glow. From the surrounding corridors, the dome appears as an immensely large lantern.

These changes occur at a radically slow pace as compared to the busy lives of the people who pass through the station, and may thus remain unnoticed. However, we hope that by spending some time here or experiencing the changing seasons, you will come to sense a certain dynamism of nature, so different from the scales we are used to, within the everyday space of this station.