The story of a building

By Neil Armstrong

The small corner plot began as half one-story business premises and half half-hearted car park.

First the premises was a jewelry store; then it subdivided and became half convenience store and half jewelry store; the convenience store ultimately won out, and just as it blossomed into something more than merely convenient the owner of the half-hearted car park followed the full extent of his non-commitment and sold up. Within hours the convenience store was returned to its flat pack origins and a picture board was erected depicting something multistoried and benevolently commercial. A building was to be born.

The investor employed an architect to be the midwife to a new street form. A draftsman produced neat looking sketches, backed up mathematically with numbers between arrows. Sketches were passed to contractors who were vague about the timeframe. That picture board was erected and passersby pursed their lips as they nodded that, yes, it definitely looks like an improvement on what went before. A vision was about to unfold.

As usual, there was no messing around and the foundations were completed before there had been time to distribute the hard hats. Sheer speed of work kept ahead of any safety risks. The lot, which had seemed too cramped to accommodate the impressive scale contained in the idealized image, magically breathed in to cope with the architect’s plans. But as the stories racked up, those who work in one of the two hospitals opposite or live in the one room apartments on all sides or who daily commute along the busy road outside asked themselves the same question time and time again: is the exterior really going to remain English Bond brick?

Well, it wasn’t. That was just the inner wall of choice for the constructors. The brick would be hidden behind the smooth black paneling that the street board had promised. What an excellent idea. Such paneling would rebuff the smoggy patina produced by the exhaust fumes chugged out onto the building’s side, and it would robustly contradistinguish the structure in an area where some of the other buildings looked like they were built to the single materials criteria ``just enough quality so as not to be vulnerable to the big bad wolf.”

And so our building was nearly complete. The area was now up-spruced and the commercial district expanded a solid block west towards the sea. What would it become? Because buildings in Korea are so often built to no specific purpose other than the generation of square yardage for rent, one’s mind ran riot. Let’s see. We have five stories. It occupies a corner plot, cleverly presenting three sides of frontage to pedestrians overwhelmed with ninety degree corners.

Yes, the windows on the first floor occupy almost the whole of that floor’s frontage but upstairs they seem mysteriously ambivalent in intent. Might a 24 hour tapas bar lay down with a cactus emporium? Will the entire fourth floor play host to an indoor Middle East-themed paintball experience? Were we about to see the city’s very first Moldovan arts and crafts center?

On Monday morning a cell phone shop opened. In this, an area with more cell phone shops than cell phones. It was joined the following Monday by an infant’s clothing shop, which would only have been interesting if infants actually shopped there. For if as recently as 2003 you couldn’t find a children’s clothing shop for love nor money, by 2011 you could not possibly possess enough love nor money to expend in their numberless profusion. But here was another. Then a noraebang appeared. A noraebang, it has to be said, ingeniously named after not one but two fruits. Winningly, it has an air traffic harassing neon sign traversing the buildings three front sides in one long strip.

The predictable retinue of usual suspects is piling up: hair shop, chain restaurant, something with nothing but mannequins in it. And that’s all good. Fair play to the entrepreneurs and good luck to them. Given the competition, they have their work cut out. In any case, there’s a guitar school up the road, a guy who sells vintage electronics, a well-stocked book cafe ― interesting businesses abound if you go looking for them.

The problem is not so much the content as the structure: our building. It is disappearing. So far every business that has set up has consumed behind signage the black marble paneling apportioned to them like night does daylight. So what was the point of using it? The building owner may as well have followed the dictates of many of his neighbors in describing his preferred architectural conception to the contractor: ``Do whatever you want with brown concrete.” Because it’s not going to make much difference. Our building is leaving us, but it was nice while it was being built.

The writer is a lecturer at Kyungnam University. He can be reached at aex_nba@yahoo.co.uk.