The Old Seoul Station (Hangul: 구서울역사; Hanja: 舊서울驛舍, literally meaning Old Seoul station building), originally named Keijo (Gyeongseong) Station and designed by Tsukamoto Yasushi of Tokyo Imperial University, was finished on November 1925. This red brick building, designed in an eclectic style, features a Byzantine-style central dome and a centralized and symmetrical layout. The floor of the Central Hall on the ground floor was covered with granite and the walls were covered with man-made stone. The wooden floor inside the building’s VIP Lounge was covered with birch wood and a western style restaurant was located on the 2nd floor.
On 25 September 1981, the old station was designated as Historic Site 284. A restoration project of the old station began on September 2007 to "transform the former Seoul Station, which had lost its functionality as a train station since the opening of the new KTX Station, into a premier national multidisciplinary cultural facility." On the same year, the management was transferred from the Cultural Heritage Administration to the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. After the design for former Seoul Station’s remodeling was developed in 2009, the remodeling construction began. On 9 August 2011, the station was reopened as a culture complex with its original exterior, after a two year of restoration project by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the state-run Korea Craft and Design Foundation (KCDF). On 2 April, 2012, "Culture Seoul Station 284" was officially launched "as a space for diverse artistic and cultural creation and exchange." The official name, which combines the station's historic, spatial, and urban symbolisms, was selected through a national open call. By combining the notion of a cultural space with the old Seoul Station’s historic site number 284, the name aims to embody the concepts of preserving its appearance and value as a historic site while simultaneously cultivating the meaning of the station as a place of various cultural intersections. The restored station is a 9,202m2 building with two stories above ground and one story below ground level.
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Famous quotes containing the word station:
“It was evident that the same foolish respect was not here claimed for mere wealth and station that is in many parts of New England; yet some of them were the “first people,” as they are called, of the various towns through which we passed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)