Design of Miarigogae-park

미아리고개공원 설계

In 1994, Songbuk-gu Office of Seoul held a design competition for Miarigogae-Park, Miarigogae has a special sense of place. It was a place where bararians had crossed the boundary to this country during the Manchu war of 1636. It was a public cemetery where only Koreans had been buried under the rule of Japanese imperialism. It was a place where national patriots had been kidnapped to the North during the Korean War. It's sorrows have been sung in the name of song-'Danjangeui-Miarigogae'(one of the most popular song in Korea). It's sense of place has been kept in every Korean people's mind in the form on 'non-physical image'. Even though, the site itself was a small space - only 1000㎡, the meaning of park-making was very significant. It meant that it would create a physical 'setting' to express the sense of place which has been existed only in our mind as a form of 'non-physical image'. In the winning scheme proposed by the author, the sense of place of Miarigogae was expressed in the form of 'castle walls' which could be easily come into everyone's mind as an image of war. The scope of work also included a crossing bridge and symbolic features. It was meaningful that a landscape architect won the competition including on those items which were not usually handled in pure landscape architectural offices. The purpose of this paper was to articulate the concept of the winning entry in detail and to describe how the concept actualized in reality.