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The island of Eden

Yejin Choi, Wonjeong Son
South Korea

The island of Eden is a free and resolving space like the Garden of Eden, and a museum where you can experience unintentional deviations from the museum space. In order to improve the quality of life of modern people, the focus of the museum space was to display emotions and allow visitors to experience the process of maximizing and resolving emotions. We thought that emotion was too subjective in the study of the moment when people felt emotion. We thought that it was not effective to display one-dimensional emotions based on individual subjectivity in this plan because of the subjectivity that someone could see and feel liberated, and someone could feel fear. So we started thinking about a space where we could generally maximize our emotions and feel them. As a result, the plan, which started with a space to relieve emotions for the quality of life of modern people, began to develop with the focus of play and deviant space. We thought that it could cause dramatic emotions to users when unintentional deviations occur by space, away from common norms of public space, not spaces that help them become one-dimensional deviations that they feel subjectively.

Of course, each person's feelings may be subjective, so we focused on the situation where everyone's feelings were maximized. For example, when we're in an essential situation where we have to work or go to school, we want freedom in our hearts. What if you suddenly pull 30 minutes from work in a schedule where every day is like a regular wheel, and suddenly the class ends an hour early? How do we feel at that moment? It may not be just a positive emotion, but at that moment, people's emotions will be maximized unexpectedly and unintentionally. We set that moment as a space concept and planned the display emotions space.

Located on an abandoned island in the middle of the city center, the museum space provides an unexpected space away from the stereotyped image of public space that we can often feel. It consists of a space where we can scream, a space where we can fully feel and meditate on the energy of the river, and a space where we can experience and escape from reality by blocking the sense of space-time. Like we're running around in the Garden of Eden. In spaces close to freedom, we can fully focus on our natural senses and be completely 'exist' in the present without being subordinate to the past and the future.

In that way, the site selected abandoned Bamseom Island in the central Han River in Seoul as the site, and decided to design a play space that can relieve the heavy emotions of modern people in the open space of the disconnected Han River. The Han River, the center of the capital of the Republic of Korea, is an important open space in the north as a new center south of the old city center, serving as a bridge between old and new things. For us, the Han River is a very familiar space as the center of the city, but since it is blocked by roads from both sides and is a fairly large river, we thought that using the river is a site that fits our concept of unintentional deviation. The plan was carried out with the aim of forming a paradise not just around the Han River, but between the center of the Han River, the lower part of the Seogang Bridge, and the mega-scale piers that deviate from the human scale.

We planned the space largely by dividing it into a sequence from the bridge to the southern end, a deviation from time and dimension, a deviation from silence, and a deviation from static rest. First of all, we formed a linear sequence in a row with an axis of disconnection from the urban axis separating Bamseom Island and the Han River diagonally, and each deviant space has a different architectural way, so that emotions can change through space in a connected linear mass.

The diagram on the left modifies the width of emotion according to the exhibition movement into a graph and expresses the density of the movement and the activity of each space. It is divided based on the exhibition spaces that are evenly divided in the plane. Each space leads from the left to a space of deviation from silence, a space of deviation from dimension, a square of freedom, and a space of deviation from rest. Each space has a different sense of density in a plane according to the characteristics of emotions, which leads to emotional changes according to the movement.

From the time you enter the lower part of the bridge, visitors can enter the exhibition space of time and space while viewing the distorted city, piers, Han River, and Bamseom Island through the mirror elevation panel. The space-time exhibition space is a closed space, so you can feel no sense of time without an opening, and by allowing a huge-scale play space beyond the human scale to unfold, you can experience a sense of freedom, comfort, and stability that cannot be seen in everyday life.

In the escape space to silence, there are noisy and chaotic spaces that contrast with the time space. In this dense space, the noise of nature flowing along the organic curved wall is mixed discontinuously, and at the same time, the water of the Han River is used to flood the space, and the sound of the river overlaps. Through this, it was planned to effectively cause noise blocking among viewers and focus on nature's noise itself to match a kind of dizziness, strange relief, and unintentional deviation space. It is a space that allows modern people to deviate from situations where they are used to silence unwantedly when they are doing essential activities, and focus on the future that bothers modern people unwantedly and the complete present that feels emotions now. The return route consists of a planned exhibition room, which is designed so that emotions do not overlap. And visitors can again feel the full view of the Han River past the main entrance, the square of freedom, and feel complete freedom in the nature of the city, Bamseom Island.

And in the next space, the deviance from static rest, the space between the columnists was planned to take a rest in nature with a series of columns, a natural scenery of Bamseom Island, and a sequence of migratory bird destinations, not a functional lamp. This is a space close to nature, and a space for resolving the emotions in the exhibition space that you felt before while looking at nature living and breathing on an architectural walkway is formed.

Through this, modern people in the city can experience deviations and feel completely themselves on Bamseom Island, an abandoned natural island in the middle of the Han River, a huge open space in the city. Even if modern people maintain their reason like cold water and live with a little rigid mind, the Eden Island Museum planned to be a space that warms our hearts by arousing our emotions like warm alcohol.

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