A retired cargo ship that operated between Mokpo and Jejudo Island off South Korea for 35 years has become an architectural installation doubling as a summertime shelter in the courtyard of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul.

The installation “Temp’L” by Shin Hyung-chul and Claire Shin’s Shinslab Architecture is the winning design in this year’s Young Architects Programme.

The Korean edition of the programme, launched by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1998, has since 2014 selected the best architectural designs that are then installed in the museum courtyard.

“It felt like a treasure hunt finding the retired ship,” says Shin Hyung-chul, who travelled to Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and China scouting out candidates. Getting one transported to South Korea would have proved problematic, but he found a suitable vessel that was about to be dismantled in the southwestern port city of Mokpo.

“I discovered aesthetics on its rusty surface and scars and in the colours created from more than 20 layers of paint,” he says. “I realised that an industrial object can be a work of art!”

The architects dismantled the 60-tonne cargo ship and added flourishes including Marcel Duchamp’s infamous urinal and Le Corbusier’s “An Eye that Cannot See”. More concepts and ideas that Shin borrowed from modern architecture are on view at Gallery 8, along with models made by finalists in the Young Architects Programme.

“‘Temp’L’ commences with an analysis,” says Sean Anderson, associate curator of architecture at MoMA in New York City, who was one of the judges. “Artists and architects tested boundaries of modernism including Marcel Duchamp, and in so doing, reconfigured these pieces of our daily life that we overlook and disregard, including environmental issues.”

Shin likens the redesigned ship to the ready-made urinal titled “Fountain” that Duchamp mockingly proclaimed to be art and displayed in a 1917 exhibition, shattering forever the notion that art had to be made by artists.

“Fountain” comprised “two popular concepts in contemporary art and architecture – presenting objects themselves as art and recycling materials”, says Park Geun-tae, curator of the project.

Le Corbusier greatly influenced Shin’s idea to transform a ship into an art installation. The French architect “presented the idea of finding beauty in industrial architecture, such as ships and aeroplanes”, Shin says, and once showed a photograph of Paris landmarks lined up, “with their shadows forming the shape of a huge ocean liner. He titled it ‘An Eye that Cannot See’.”

Shin turned his ship upside down and planted trees inside it to create a garden. In contrast to the sturdy exterior, the inside is filled with green leaves, a place passers-by can rest. He cut several holes in the hull to let in the breeze.

“Le Corbusier said, ‘Architecture is a machine for living,'” Shin says. “I think architecture should be alive.”