Shinchon Youth Culture Base Camp was designed with the urban regeneration of Shinchon, a location known as Seoul's representative university district, as its major theme. Despite its commercial decline, Shinchon remained a densely populated area of young people, and the project aimed to strengthen the identity of the space by supporting cultural activities of the youth. If the youth culture of the 1980s in Shinchon manifested as popular culture infused with a spirit of resistance during the historical process of democratization, the current youth culture is characterized by the combination of cultural consumption and content production, expressed through various forms of entrepreneurship and cultural practices. Particularly, with the transformation of Yonsei-ro Street into a car-free street in 2014, the external spaces of the city became functional as stages for cultural activities. In this context, Changcheon Cultural Park embodies significant potential for urban regeneration.

Changcheon Cultural Park is located adjacent to the intersection of Yonsei-ro Street, the busiest area in Shinchon in terms of pedestrian flow, and Myeongmul-gil. The intersection features an exit shared by Shinchon Station, Hyundai Department Store, and the large shopping center called U-Plex, attracting a large number of people on Yonsei-ro Street and hosting frequent events. However, despite being the only park in Shinchon and an open space, cultural activities do not take place within the park due to its outdated facilities and the form of the park. Therefore, as part of the regeneration project, it became essential to renovate the park and restore its function as an accessible open space.

To achieve this, the lower levels were designed as intermediate zones between the park and the building, allowing for enhanced flow of cultural activities from Changcheon Cultural Park to Yonsei-ro Street. The entrance area, which connects with the park on the first floor, was constructed using post-tensioning technique, raising it with a 10m cantilever. The public restroom was positioned on the western corner as a park facility, and the entrance, elevated towards the bustling U-Plex intersection with a wide staircase, serves as a second-floor public space and can be used as seating facing the park. By utilizing the staircase as seating, the entire park is structured with a hierarchy that can be utilized as a stage. Lighting and sound equipment were installed on the suspended ceiling of the building to enable various events and performances, utilizing the park's ground as a stage.

In urban regeneration projects, a flagship project often demands more than simply creating necessary spaces. Architects are confronted with the question of how to play a role beyond designing buildings. Architects contemplate alternative ways in which architecture can go beyond contextualism and functional integration of programs. For this purpose, the Shinchon Youth Culture Base Camp sought to go beyond its relationship with the park and challenge the existence, nature, conventions, and approaches of buildings responding to the city. By adopting the concept of "not being a building" or the "form between architecture and pavilion," it aimed to tell a new story about the city through a different narrative.

The entire building was enveloped with a facade, crafted with artisanal precision, that conceals traditional elements of architecture such as walls, columns, roofs, and windows. Instead of extending the context by creating another building that appears as a homogeneous envelope within the densely commercialized area, the new building presents a complete contrast to the city, aiming to establish a new context. From a distance, it appears as a single mass with a homogeneous skin within the park, intriguing viewers as an object where architectural elements are not immediately discernible when observed up close. The facade consists of 15,000 aluminum anodizing panels that reflect light unevenly due to their different angles, creating a varied texture. By rationalizing the panels into three types, they became the primary material for the exterior, allowing the building to appear as a single object with a continuous yet multi-faceted texture without revealing the internal structure and spatial arrangement. When the interior lighting illuminates at night, the architectural configuration is implicitly revealed, and it transforms into a building.

The architecture is situated in a corner of the urban park, taking into account the site of a three-sided shape. It is positioned facing the commercial facilities, with a 4-meter road separating it in the north-south direction. The volume of the proposed building faces the existing commercial facilities in a north-south orientation, resulting in a narrow and elongated horizontal form. In this context, the new building offers a proposal for the landscape covered with advertising signs of the commercial space, suggesting a new urban context. By eliminating elements such as floor differentiations and windows on the building's facade, it aims to imbue the character of a pavilion rather than a traditional architectural structure. The facade consists of 15,000 aluminum anodizing panels, each with varying angles that reflect light in an irregular manner, and these panels have been rationalized into three types as the primary material for the exterior cladding. This approach allows the internal structure and spatial arrangement to remain concealed, presenting the building as a unified entity or a continuous object with multidimensional textures. When the interior lighting illuminates at night, the implicit organization of the interior spaces becomes apparent, transforming it into a building.