Night School
A Proposal of Establishing a Cultural and Academic Community on an Abandoned Urban Infrastructure Space
Regarding the so called ‘Ghost Platform’ as a mythical subject, which is retained but not in use, and inspired by '9 and 3/4 platform' appeared in the fiction 'Harry Potter', the project attempts to employ a non-normative design process maneuvering narrative and movie scenes and to adapt Sudo institute that is a cradle of qualification exams.
The ghost platform is now used to describe disused station once actively used, especially those on underground railway. The study departs from the mythic presence of an abandoned platform. It is a link between the ghost platform and the Academy that can motivate this urban myth to develop a storytelling; that is, the hidden platform which remains intact but inaccessible, present but absent, and Sudo-academy located at the upper part of Station. the Sudo-academy is oldest remaining education institute for qualification examination since 70s. This academy, so called ‘night education’, was known as a private institute to get a certain degree without the regular school curriculum that society required.
The project attempts to employ ‘9 and 3/4 platform’ appeared in the novel ‘Harry Potter' in order to decompose the symbolic meaning of 'Ghost Station' to frame a story-telling for the project, and to proceed the design on the basis of narrative structure of the story. To be concrete, the project borrows the analogical process of the ‘Stourhead garden’ construction, in which the narrative structure made by overlapping the myth of Virgil's Odyssey with history of king Alfred in British Empire turned to be programs. In other words, as the hidden platform in the novel ‘Harry Potter’ is to be superimposed on the ghost platform of the Sinsuldong station, the Sudo-academy in the site is renewed to be a ‘Night School' that corresponds to the ‘Magic School’ in the novel. What the project aims at is suggesting a new perspective on reading the city as well as presenting a possibility of interpreting the fringeland within the city, by introducing a design method that structures the relationship between the site and context into a narrative based on film and literature and that transforms the narrative into a new program for the design process. This project attempted to develop a non-normative design process in the relationship among the site, program, and representation, to manipulate the context of the site through fictional narrative in order to structuralize the architectural relationship from the abandoned subterranean platform to the Sudo-academy on earth, and to verify that the mythical urban facts turns to a design motive for storytelling. Metaphorically superimposed meaning of each scenes upon a narrative adapted from the novels and movies of Harry Potter, the project intends to treat the abnormal education system of G.E.D. academy and the ‘Magic school’ in the Harry Potter on equal footing, and to intervene in the urban context and programs with the narrative. As a result, introducing a new story to the city for constructing a multi-layered context is considered to be an innovative way of seeing the urbanism and of corresponding with the periodical tendency in post-industrial society.
