The design competition for Office of Seoul Combined-Cycle Thermal Power Plant is to create a new type of combined office with a plant facility located in where the first national thermal power plant of Danginlee Power Plant built in 1930 is currently located. Discarding the superannuated ground power plant operating to date, a new underground power plant in Korea is now under construction. A park and combined office with the plant are soon to become realized aboveground for the public. Changing a mundane image of the power plant generating electricity by reflecting cultural and historical values that Danginlee Power Plant has to a new design is the main purpose. This would bring new cultures to society both psychologically and physically. “Commemorate the first place lighting up” The design proposal means to commemorate Danginlee Power Plant. It is the first power plant built in Korea which had lighten up the cities for the first time. This first time event has brought an idea of tower to continuously remember it. Tower as an expression of the very first moment of the event supposedly reminds a meaning of unknown. This sense of psychological awareness after all has become one key motive to design the new plant. A formative concept of tower covers a 100 meters high chimney stack from the ground and it simultaneously brings a new gesture to overcome the unfavorable images that ordinary chimneys have. “Express the energy of light as the energy of culture”
The part of new plant exposed aboveground is not purposely concealed, but it is rather exploited as a cultural facility called, “Culture Plants”. The 18 meters high external concrete walls of the plant protect the facility as well as exhibit Grand Stone designed on the surface as a milestone of Danginlee Power Plant history. Its surroundings expressed as art exhibits are open to the public. The way they encase it leads the visitors to recognize the whole building as a massive gallery, and through this making cultural facility strategy the power generating plant would become the Culture Plants.