The Memorial Monument of 1988 Seoul Olympic Park, Korea

There are so many interesting place for looking around in Metropolitan Seoul.
In this posting, I’d like to introduce 1988 Seoul Olympic Park in Seoul.
Summer Olympic was held in Seoul.
1988 Seoul Olympic game was one of the largest in history of Olympiad.
It was the end stage of the cold war, so almost of all countries took part in Seoul Olympiad regardless of the political ideology.

Seoul metropolitan planned to make a park for the memory of this olympiad.
In that plan, the most important thing was the monument.
They made the world peace gate for the memory of Seoul Olympiad.
Here, the peace had the specific meaning that all countries had participated in Seoul Olympiad regardless of the ideology at the end of the Cold War.

The most representative Korean architect Kim Jungeop designed this gate of the world peace.
But The preparation committee decided to downsize the peace gate to the half scale.
Actually the whole size became smaller 1/4 to the original proposal.

The committee though the gate was too large at that times.
But the architect Kim Jungeop was angry about downsizing his design.
Because there will be constructed many buildings around the gate, then the appearance of the gate must be looked humble.

So angry architect Kim never had visited this gate in his life.

Anyway, I visited Seoul Olympic park and took some photos.
Below are the photos of the world peace gate.

The colors and the patterns were the traditional Korean style.
The architect seemed to take the motive from the Korean traditional folk stories.

Behind the gate, there were the national flags taking part in Seoul Olympiad.

At that time, the peace in the earth was not a dream.

1988 was the most peaceful period in my memory.