All Koreans grow up hearing about “The Hangang (River) Miracle”, a period of rapid development in Korean contemporary history. The Guro region was at the root of this miracle. Created by the state-led government in the 1960’s, the Guro Industrial Complex was a cluster of industrial plants in southwestern Seoul where young female workers gathered. While it fueled Korea's rapid growth, concerns regarding democratic labor and human rights arose due to its framework of exploiting women's low-wage labor. The MUSEUM G initiative hears from the voices of the Guro Industrial Complex and begins to examine its heritage.

 MUSEUM G, first opened in Guro-gu in September 2021, is Seoul's first labor and industrial museum. It is built on the site of the former "Guro Water Purification Plant," which supplied industrial water to the Guro Industrial Complex. We designed a media library, special exhibition hall, and content around the concept of "Connect," "Listen," and "See,” so that visitors may clearly feel the meaning of MUSEUM G. 

MUSEUM G's media library, located in an office building, features a pane of glass on one side. The first challenge was to capture the museum’s meaning while designing an experience that leveraged the space’s features and conveyed openness. In architecture, windows represent openings and connections to the outside world. We opted to embrace Guro's current and developing terrain in the design of the media library. Furthermore, the media library overlaps with a media kiosk that reveals the memories of those who lived in the past, as well as the heritage of the Guro Industrial Complex. 

The second challenge involved the relationship between the permanent exhibition and the special exhibition. The permanent exhibition space contains genuine industrial artifacts, and intense lighting was used to attract attention to the relics. The special exhibition, on the other hand, utilized a white cube in order to best showcase the artworks that interpret Korea’s modern industrial history from the perspective of contemporary artists, as symbolized by Guro. The media library acts as a bridge, connecting the two opposing exhibition spaces.

The third challenge required us to determine what type of experience the media kiosk would provide as a bridge between visitors and content. The three previously described motifs, "Connect," "Listen," and "See," were conveyed in the media library's three intersecting X, Y, and Z axes. This axis also alludes to the sphere's three temporal axes: past, present, and future. Wide lines and faces intersect the inside and ceiling of the media library, creating undetectable junctions. Located at the crossroads of these three axes, G Valley Explorer Media is a media company that has around 7,000 archives from the Guro Industrial Complex, 300 oral archives, and 3D artifacts that have been acquired using 3D scans. By arranging media panels in various angles, visitors are able to sit and study huge volumes of material.