SPACE June 2026 (No. 703)
Winning proposal of Boryeong Light Stone Forest Park Invited Design Competition ©THE_SYSTEM LAB
On Apr. 9, Boryeong City announced THE_SYSTEM LAB (Principal, Kim Chanjoong) as the winner of the invited design competition for the Boryeong Light Stone Forest Park. The competition called for a master plan, architectural design, and operational strategy for Boryeong Light Stone Forest Park on a site of 25,591m2. It was launched to accomplish two main goals: first, expanding the regional stone culture into a larger landscape that combines leisure and culture, second, supplementing the limitations of the existing park and contributing to local revitalisation. THE_SYSTEM LAB takes a close look at Boryeong’s unique local asset, Oseok, and utilised it as a primary medium for recovering a sense of place and to sustain regional vitality. The team stated that they focused on ‘transforming Oseok from a mere object of observation into a programmatic toolkit that connects physical experience with everyday life, and furthermore into a circular construction system linked to local infrastructure, from material production to construction’. As a significant example, stones from adjacent quarries are used as formwork for casting walls and are later reused as landscaped mounds. A continuous space without clear boundaries between inside and outside is created with a 15m structural grid, three glass boxes, and a stone slate roof. The minimal use of finishing material, taking economic considerations into account, contributes to producing a layered landscape in which architecture, landscape, and infrastructure are integrated as a unified one. The winning team commented that the proposal had received positive evaluations for ‘its original interpretation of Oseok, a local material, not simply as a finishing material but as something embedded into the structure and construction process of architecture itself’.
