- The Start of a Grueling All Nighter
In the video, Geonshin asked a female student with an awkward expression,
“I heard Gwangseong University’s athletic field might disappear because it’ll be turned into a sports center. What do you think?”
“What? Really? The athletic field is going away?”
“Yes. From what I saw, the field doesn’t get used much, so it seemed like it might be okay even if it’s gone. Is it because it’s too small?”
“It is small. So we don’t really use it, but…”
After thinking for a moment, the female student continued, as if something suddenly came to mind.
“Actually, the campus is small and the buildings are big, so when you’re at school it feels really suffocating. So usually, we gather in places where we can look out at the athletic field.”
“Ah. So that’s why you were sitting around the field.”
“Yes, that’s right. It’s nothing but headaches, assignments and exams, and at our school, other than the athletic field, there isn’t really anywhere that lets you breathe. If that disappears, where are we supposed to go? No, seriously! Why are they saying they’re going to get rid of it?”
“Huh. I’m not the one doing it, it’s just that…”
The video continued to contain interviews with many students. Some students welcomed the sports center, but most opposed the athletic field disappearing.
That the only space on campus where you could feel some margin, where you could breathe, was the athletic field. A small empty field, shabby, barely clinging on like a cicada on an old tree, and not even used, for the school it was abandoned land that could be filled with a building, but for students, the emptiness itself was a precious place of healing.
Geonshin had gotten a hint from his memories with employee Kim Song, but in the end, the ones who suffered most from adults’ greed were the students.
Watching the video, Team Leader Seungjin looked at Geonshin and let out a hollow laugh.
“So that’s why that kid kept carrying the digital camera around. And why he kept showing up at the student cafeteria all the time.”
At that moment, Assistant Manager Soomin’s eyes grew moist as she watched the video.
Seeing this, Director Yoo-uk said in flustered confusion,
“What is it, Soomin. What’s wrong? Did someone die?”
“Oh. No. Why am I like this?”
She pretended not to care, but the people in the meeting room felt like they understood what emotion it was.
“It’s just… seeing the students. It suddenly got to me.”
“Yeah…”
“I was anxious when I was in college too. What do I do about getting a job? Why aren’t my grades coming out? Whenever that happened, I’d go up to the architecture building rooftop and stare at faraway mountains while sighing. I think I understand what it means to want to breathe.”
An architect spreads out yellow tracing paper and draws lines on it. In that single stroke must be thousands of worries, and thousands of possibilities must be considered.
If a place without philosophy is filled with greed, it is only an empty fullness. It appears as a result of blocking someone’s path to breathe within the city.
What Division 7 felt in this moment was a kind of responsibility. Their survival mattered too, but they thought they had to set right the single stroke that someone had drawn wrong.
But what mattered in the end was winning. Even if they pointed out Mirim Architecture’s error and submitted a completely different plan, the president would surely give his vote to Mirim Architecture’s proposal. Because it was his son-in-law.
In fact, if it were a normal competition, there would have been no need to look closely at the page about the evaluation method in the design brief. A good proposal would naturally get a good score.
In the end, the choice belonged to the judges. Because you did not win just because the plan was good. They needed judges who would vote, according to their conscience, for the proposal they judged to be good.
But the possibility that Division 7 could win by the judges’ votes was close to 0%.
Geonshin also dug into this point obsessively.
“The strongest key to overturning this situation is in the evaluation method.”
“The evaluation method?”
“Yes. It isn’t decided who they are, of course, but the point is that the judging is done by four people.”
“That’s right. It did say in the design brief, unusually, that it’s four people.”
“Not five, but four? Those guys are saying it’s already decided, so they don’t care about making it an odd number!”
As soon as the talk turned to judging, Director Yoo-uk felt chills.
“Then you need three votes to win. The president will definitely be on the judging panel, and a Gwangseong University architecture professor will too. That’s already two votes. How do we overturn this. This is bad.”
Revealing the judges for a design competition was prohibited. Because if you approached them in advance and pulled strings, you could not have a fair evaluation.
But in a design competition where the client is a university, usually the president, one of the board members, or an architecture professor is included. And the rest are architects from outside the school.
Since the judging panel must be made up so that more than half are outsiders no matter what, the fact they set it at only four people meant the votes of the two insiders were already decided.
In that moment, Geonshin thought:
‘The president’s stance is firm anyway. What he wants is to cover the athletic field with a flashy building that can become a city landmark. But that will definitely have a negative impact on this campus. Then what strategy do we take to win? Winning the judges’ votes is impossible anyway. In that case…’
Change the way the game is played.
“We don’t need three votes.”
“What? Then we lose.”
“No. Two votes is fine too. It’s a tie.”
“A tie?”
Now Director Yoo-uk thought, “What good is a tie?”
Team Leader Seungjin pointed at the last page of the design brief and said,
“Here. It says that if there is a tie, they do a vote by randomly selected students. In very small print.”
“Ah! Really? A student vote? Then it’s not like we have no chance.”
“That’s right. In that video, the students opposed getting rid of the athletic field!”
Geonshin’s strategy was to draw a tie among the judges. If it became a tie, then the rest would be decided not by the judges or the president’s will, but by the students’ choice.
Then the problem was that they absolutely had to get two votes out of four. At that moment, Team Leader Seungjin looked at Director Yoo-uk with burning eyes.
“Now it’s your turn, Director.”
“What?”
Through the bundle meeting, Division 7 decided to submit the competition entry using Geonshin’s idea.
If they lost, it was over anyway, but they wanted to submit the best plan and leave at least the meaning of a challenge.
At the very least, shouldn’t they be able to appeal to President Kang Inseong by saying, we made this kind of plan for this site. Isn’t it well made?
Starting the next day, Division 7 began running like crazy. Based on the idea Geonshin had set, they had to enter the intermediate design process. With time tight, they skipped unnecessary verification stages and case research.
Team Leader Seungjin had to start the overall floor plan. But trying to turn Geonshin’s vague idea into drawings created parts that were hard to understand.
It was a campus undergrounding that did not yet exist in the world.
“Just a moment.”
Geonshin disappeared to the model table. He rolled his wrists and loosened up his body. Then he opened the status window.
[Pritzker Prize Winning Project.]
Goal: 100Lv (3/100Lv)
On receiving the contract: 3Lv
On completion: 3Lv
Mission 2. Win the Gwangseong University Sports Center Design Competition.
Reward: Creativity 10 SP (5/100SP) Skill 10 SP (5/100SP)
Attached: 3 TB Folder Use Coupon x10.
At some point, five skill points had accumulated. When Geonshin reached out and pressed Skill, a bright light burst from the number 5 on the back of his hand.
When he picked up the old model knife on the table, he felt a heavy sensation, as if it had become one with his hand.
‘The skill I’ll use today is… [Model Work].’
Geonshin realized that his hands had become three or four times faster and more accurate than at his peak.
Since they had to visually confirm the level difference, the model had to express even the surrounding buildings, including the athletic field.
But one knife was enough. From the flexible curves of the hill to the straight lines of the long road, he carved them out as if cut by a machine.
He cut the joints where wall met wall at 45 degrees so they would be attached at a perfect right angle.
And he melted the idea in his head into the model.
Every piece, a quality that would be impossible without a model company’s expensive equipment. But Geonshin finished it in an instant with nothing but one knife. You could not call it anything but mechanical craftsmanship.
‘If we succeed in this project and skill points pile up, what’s next? When new design programs that will come out in the future appear, I should try using them right away.’
“Here it is.”
Seeing Geonshin suddenly appear holding the model, Team Leader Seungjin was flustered.
The sports center faintly visible under the athletic field, the ramps and stairs that allowed direct entry from the sidewalk, the cool open space visible at a glance.
There was no time to be surprised in a situation like this, but a fear circled in Team Leader Seungjin’s head, wondering what would have happened right now if it weren’t for Geonshin.
‘That guy, did he really reincarnate or something? He keeps making me feel at a loss.’
Plan work is the process of turning a three dimensional idea into two dimensional drawings.
Within the given total floor area and building coverage ratio, which part of the athletic field would be what size, where inside they would place the medium sized lecture rooms (capacity 60), the management office, the storage rooms the client said they needed, and how.
The sports facilities, what size would allow futsal, volleyball, and basketball. It was work that was hard to do without the knowledge and experience an architect basically needed.
Team Leader Seungjin was a master of this kind of work. He obtained that difficult architect license at a young age in one shot, so what more could you say. But even for masters, the part that was hard to memorize and tricky was reviewing the regulations. To check every year what changes and additions came into a book as thick as a dictionary was difficult.
But before he knew it, whenever Team Leader Seungjin hit a blockage, he would always call Geonshin.
“Na Geonshin! Did you look into the energy saving plan report?”
“Yes. Usually for educational facilities, only 10,000 m2 and above are subject to submission, so we don’t fall under it.”
“Whew… that’s a relief. What about the evacuation stairs?”
“You need a direct stair from floors at B2 and below straight to the ground floor. In that case, all stairs must be planned as special evacuation stairs. And just to be safe, if the total floor area is 1,000 m2 or more and the height is 13 m or more, you have to get structural safety confirmation.”
“13 m? Then it doesn’t matter. Got it.”
As Geonshin turned to leave after saying that, Team Leader Seungjin stared at him blankly.
‘What is this? I can’t tell if I’m working with a part timer or a current professional…’
If building regulations came out like he was reciting them, that meant he had memorized them until his mouth wore out. But what reason would a mere part timer have to memorize that?
It wasn’t strange that Team Leader Seungjin let out a dumbfounded admiration.
But if you think about Geonshin’s position before his regression, the reason was simple.
Since Geonshin drew drawings doing subcontract work, he had to buy the building code book every year because the regulations changed each year, and because of the habit of flipping through it when he was bored, he had it somewhat memorized.
He repeated that for twenty years, so for general buildings that weren’t special situations, the contents could only come out like a vending machine.
And on top of that.
‘Maybe because I regressed. Maybe because my brain got younger. The contents come to mind clearly. It feels like my brain is working faster because I’m being rewarded with creativity.’
A building is not made with just the design part alone. Within the large frame called architecture, there are many fields, structure, mechanical, electrical, fire, landscaping, interior, and an architecture firm had to control these and carry out collaboration.
If the architect draws one room, the structural team has to review the loads the floor and walls receive, and the electrical and mechanical teams have to set in advance the points where the fluorescent lights or outlets will go, and plan what routes the pipes will run. Each time, the amount of drawings exchanged and the work of sorting them by field and grasping them was no small matter.
When Team Leader Seungjin’s work was nearing completion, Assistant Manager Soomin had to send the drawings out to the partner firms, control them, and complete the remaining drawings.
And when the work of directly doing this kind of design ended, they had to immediately finish the design report and panel work for submission to the design competition.
No matter how well made a plan is, if the person judging it doesn’t understand what concept it has and what points are good, wouldn’t there be a high chance of being unfairly eliminated?
Panels usually refer to an architectural summary on A0 size. It takes aerial renders made by a CG company, a simple concept explanation, drawings, site plan, and so on, designs them to look good, and puts the necessary information into one big board.
It was no exaggeration to say the first impression of judging is decided by these panels.
Having to do all of that, work that looked overwhelming just to see, with three people, was in fact close to impossible.
Team Leader Seungjin and Geonshin gave up on going home.
When they got sleepy and felt like they would collapse while working, they took turns napping on the model making table in the corner of the office.
When they got up, they would wash their face roughly in the bathroom and sit back down at the computer.
The first thing Assistant Manager Soomin did when she arrived on the first train at dawn was to wake Team Leader Seungjin and Geonshin.
When class time came close while Geonshin was working, he went to school. The short nap he took on the subway going back and forth was so sweet. The problem was that he passed a few stations sometimes.
After living like this for about a week, the outline of the intermediate design began to show. The tasks that had seemed impossible were solved and handled one by one.
But, as always, when work is tight, an incident is bound to happen.
Assistant Manager Soomin woke Geonshin, who was crouched and sleeping at the table at dawn, as usual. But that day, her tone was different, like something had happened.
“Geonshin. Geonshin, wake up. Something’s wrong!”
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