Bucheon Art Bunker B39

Walk the old waste route

The visitor path begins where garbage trucks once unloaded. From the former intake hall, it moves past the 39-metre waste bunker, the furnace void, ash-handling spaces and the rooms that pushed treated exhaust toward the chimney. The renovation deliberately follows the incineration process rather than hiding it

The bunker gives B39 its name and scale. It was the concrete storage pit where mixed municipal waste accumulated before burning; today its vertical volume is used for installations, performance and filming. Nearby, the former furnace chamber was stripped back into the open-air Air Gallery, leaving the industrial frame and changing the space from a sealed combustion zone into a courtyard

A bridge added during renovation connects these spaces so visitors can move through the former process in sequence

The machines stayed

The most specific industrial history sits on the second floor. The central control room still contains the panels and equipment that once monitored the entire incineration system. Beside it, the ash bunker and crane-control room retain machinery used to lift residue after burning

Other spaces changed function more aggressively. The garbage-truck intake hall became the Multimedia Hall; workers’ rest and overnight rooms became studios; the induced-draft fan room, a tall vertical space used to move cleaned exhaust toward the chimney, was preserved as a performance and filming space

That mixture matters more than a generic “industrial” atmosphere. B39 keeps enough equipment and process sequence intact for visitors to understand what the building did before art entered it

The pollution crisis that changed the site

The Samjeong-dong incinerator began operating in 1995 and burned about 200 tonnes of Bucheon waste a day. Residents soon questioned its environmental safety. In 1997, a government-directed test found dioxin emissions at more than twenty times the permissible level

Citizen groups organized for closure, and the plant stopped for six months while pollution-control equipment was expanded. It resumed in 1998, but its role diminished as Bucheon expanded the Daejang-dong resource-circulation center. Samjeong-dong stopped operating in 2010; the waste facility was formally abolished in 2013

Demolition was expected. Instead, the abandoned plant entered a national cultural-regeneration project in 2014. Architect Kim Kwang-soo’s renovation preserved the waste-processing axis and much of the machinery, and Bucheon Art Bunker B39 opened in 2018

The building therefore carries both parts of the story: the environmental conflict that made the old plant untenable and the decision to preserve its machinery rather than erase it

Before you go

The strongest visit is architectural even when no major exhibition is running. Moving through the first-floor bunker, Air Gallery and emission-control spaces before the second-floor control room makes the original industrial sequence much easier to understand. Some areas can close during rentals or events, so the preserved machinery—not a specific temporary show—is the reliable core