Commendation Award Environment Sustainability to Symbolize Korea
By Troels Kranker
Seoul National University
I arrived in Seoul three weeks ago on a sunny afternoon, tired from a seven-and-a-half hour flight from Dubai. I had been told that the buddy program at Seoul National University, where I was about to study at for the next semester, was not able to provide me with a pick-up service. I therefore had to figure out how to arrive at my one-room apartment in Shilim-dong myself. However, when I went into the arrival terminal I was surprised. My personal buddy, Jung-Eun Lee, had borrowed her mother's car, picked up the keys for my room, driven an hour to Incheon airport and waited for me for another hour because my flight was delayed. I was stunned with joyful emotions as if I was attending my own surprise party.
This is an example of how overwhelmingly embracing, helpful, polite, kind, and compassionate Koreans and the Korean society are. Over the next few weeks, this gesture of collectiveness and appreciation of the greater good for the benefit of the community and the members within it, no matter their national origins, continued to repeat itself. That was when it struck me that it was not just a one-time coincidence, but a deeply inherited cultural trait of the Korean society from, among others the Confucianist and Buddhist traditions with their focus on compassion and respect for the surroundings.
When I then stumbled upon this competition, surfing the Korea Times website for material on the political situation to report back to Denmark, I thought to myself "How can this inherited trait of holistic thinking be expressed so the rest of the world will know just how welcoming the Korean society is toward foreigners and each other?".
It immediately came into my mind - SeoulSky, "Your Crucial Contribution". It became clear to me that Seoul and Korea need a symbol that summarizes and communicates the unique goodness of this country. A completely 100 % sustainable and recyclable landmark building where locals and tourists can meet, interact and collaborate on generating sustainable energy for the city of Seoul and the rest of Korea and the world. A self-sufficient greenhouse. Not only would the entire construction of the building be sustainable and self-supplying from usage of ecological materials and sustainable energy sources, the interior of the building would contain facilities that actually generate energy to the rest of Seoul, the Korean peninsula and the world.
This could be a fitness center where visitors can improve their own health while improving the lives of others and the surrounding environment. Or a restaurant with pure ecological goods grown on the roof garden. SeoulSky will be a total 3-D educational experience complex, informing the visitors about the environmental crisis and what has been done by individuals, organizations, and governments throughout the years to prevent the crisis from emerging further, and what can be done by each individual. The exterior of the building would be completely covered in solar energy cells and the geothermal heating from the earth's core would be sustainable isolated throughout the building to avoid heat energy waste. According to Peter Senge in "The Necessary Revolution," 60 % of the world's greenhouse gasses come from poor isolated buildings. This is what the architect William McDonough and the German chemist Michael Braungart calls "Cradle to Cradle Design" and this is why it is crucial in the future to engage in intelligent design and the reason why my idea concentrates on a building.
Korea has for 50 years been technological pioneers and it is now time to take advantage of this position to conquer the position as the environmental technology innovator of the world. SeoulSky will not be the tallest building in the world. Neither will it contain the world's largest shopping mall nor the world's biggest indoor ski slope. However, it will be the most sustainable and ecological building ever to be set on the face of earth. It will stand as a product of our time for future generations and for the new rising environmentally-aware global consciousness, which might be named "The Korean Consciousness".