Design for Administrative Welfare Center in Shindong-myeon, Chuncheon-si

Sile Village and Tourism

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'My hometown is in the mountains of Gangwon-do. It is a small village that you can reach if you go around the mountain about 20 li from Chuncheon-eup. It is a cozy village surrounded by thick mountains on the front, back, left and right, and buried in them. It is called Sile because the shape of the mountain is like a muddy rice cake.' Yu-Jung Kim Essay <The Mountain Valley in May>

Since the 1960s, the Seoul-Chuncheon railway and national highway transportation has been improved, and since the 1960s, Chuncheon and the surrounding area have been in the limelight as a short-term travel course for the population in the metropolitan area. The Kim Yu-jeong Literary Village in Sindong-myeon, Chuncheon-si, and the abandoned Gyeongchun Line rail bike project were developed as recreation, leisure, and tourism businesses. Sille Village, Shindong-myeon, the hometown of novelist Kim Yu-jeong, was a quiet farming village in the mountains, but with the development of Kim Yu-jeong Literature Village in the early 2000s and the opening of the Gyeongchun Line in the metropolitan area in 2010, it has recorded more than 1 million visitors per year as of 2021.

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Sindong-myeon, Administrative Welfare Center

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At the center of Sile Village, with Geumbyeongsan Mountain in the background, the existing administrative welfare center and health branch are located. The sparsely populated surroundings feel relaxed with nature as the background. The site is used without boundaries with the Nonghyup building to the northeast, sharing a parking lot, as is often the case in rural villages. Across the four-lane front road to the northwest, we face Yujeong Plaza, the largest shopping district in the town.

​The newly built Administrative Welfare Center will accommodate the living SOC in addition to the administrative and health functions of the family, handle the additional parking demand, and especially consider the comfortable streetscape that blends with the surroundings. The civil service office and public health center on the first floor consider accessibility from the front road and are connected to the adjacent Nonghyup building. The parking lot for civil petitioners with a capacity of 35 cars is separated from the pedestrian space to enable vehicle circulation within the site, and connection with the adjacent Nonghyup building is also considered.

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universal landscapes and memories

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There is a familiar landscape of a secluded rural village outside the metropolitan area. Winding farm roads and national highways that run through villages, old farmhouses and weekend houses for outsiders entering between them, village halls and Nonghyup buildings that look similar, and commercial buildings along the national highways... Signs accidentally or inevitably compose the universal landscape of rural villages. 

In the wild landscape of rural villages restored after the war, infrastructure was reorganized under the influence of the government-led rural modernization movement, and modern facilities such as gona government offices and schools were built. Modern facilities that have been repeatedly reproduced from one village to another also add time, become old and patched up, enter the wild landscape, and repeat that another trend is added to the village landscape. And these landscapes are structurally located and overlapped in people's memories, and they come to us as familiar.

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Coexistence, unfamiliarity and familiarity

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In addition to the general rural landscape, there is a unique landscape of this village. The new Gyeongchun Line Station with roof tiles on the concrete structure, thatched-roofed houses in Kim Yu-jeong Literary Village and the membrane structure of the outdoor performance hall, rail bike convenience facilities and restaurants created by tourists... The uniqueness of the area located in the middle of Chuncheon and Gangchon is such unfamiliarity. Even the scenery is absorbed as a romantic element necessary for tourism, making a small village of 700 households sustainable.

​Our proposal is an attempt to reconstruct the village scenery made up of individual events from a romantic perspective and 'mythological'. This is to add a familiar yet interesting landscape to Sile Village by composing the architectural symbols that exist around it in a neutral way, and to create a frame that looks at the village landscape from a new perspective. Another unfamiliarity made of something familiar that reflects locality makes it possible to 'coexist' in the relationship between the background (Sile Village) and the icon (Administrative Welfare Center).