A discourse on the Independence Hall of Korea, a representative cultural project of the 1980s, has been understood as a repetition of the traditional debate of the 1960s. It was considered as a petrified propaganda aimed at ensuring the fragile legitimacy of the military regime, and the architect as a sympathizer. Even if all these facts are true, it does not give any explanation for the architecture. Scrutinizing the building process and the change of discourse in the Independence Hall of Korea, this paper tries to explore a section of contemporary Korean architecture in the 1980s. The architect who designed the Independence Hall of Korea is Kim Kiwoong, however, it was Kim Won who took charge of overall scheme for it. Kim Won replaced the role of a technocrat in the 1960s, who deprived architects of his autonomy. Against this backdrop, Kim Kiwoong attempted to explain his own building via various concept like postmodernism, which gave him very proper context. But, later, he appropriated words like void and madang. These derived from some architectural historian’s researches in 1970s, and were to predict the architecture of the 1990s.