Ma Yun-jae and Oh Se-jin, students majoring in architectural design at Kookmin University's College of Architecture, won the grand prize for their project “Hong-eun Cultural Bath” at the 2025 Junglim Student Architecture Awards.

The Junglim Student Architecture Awards is a competition organized by the Junglim Architecture Culture Foundation, which has provided an opportunity to imagine and design the cities and architecture of the near future through themes closely related to Korean society every year since 2005. This year, a total of 417 teams from across the country applied for the contest, and 15 of them advanced to the finals. Five of the teams that advanced to the finals won the Grand Prize, 10 won the Second Prize, and two won the Special Prize.

The theme of the 2025 competition was “Archaeologists and Inventors.” Recently, the concept of “reusing buildings,” which involves recycling existing buildings due to rising construction costs and environmental issues, has been gaining attention. This competition presented the task of interpreting and reconstructing the buildings built for the 1980 Asian Games and the Olympics from a new perspective. The participants were required to analyze the social, historical, and cultural contexts of buildings approved for use in the 1980s from the perspective of an archaeologist and propose creative architectural solutions like an inventor.

'Hong Eun Culture Bath' is a project that has transformed an old bathhouse building into a cultural space, and has been praised for its unique spatial composition that connects the past and the present and its proposal of a new structure to overcome the limitations of the existing structure. The judges explained the reason for selecting the grand prize as follows: “The sensitive interpretation of the context of the existing building and the sincere consideration of solving structural problems are impressive.”