Chapter 33. Seocho-dong 1685-3
When Geonshin was sixteen, he had an older cousin who had come up from his aunt’s house in the countryside.
Park Changmin, a sophomore in the architecture department at a university in Seoul, had been lodging at Geonshin’s house ever since Geonshin’s first year of middle school.
To Geonshin, who was an only child, he was more than an actual older brother.
If Geonshin asked him about something he did not know, he answered easily.
Sometimes he would slip him a thousand won and tell him to go to the comic book rental shop. And around the time hair had started growing here and there, he had even laughed slyly and lent him adult videos.
That person was Changmin.
“Hey, hey, Geonshin. Come over here. What does this look like to you?”
“Wow, hyung, did you make this?”
“Of course I did. Keke. Pretty amazing, right?”
Changmin, who was an architecture student, often worked in his room. At some point, his room had become full of foam board scraps, scale rulers, Ogong Bond glue, and the like.
With those tools lying around in a mess, Geonshin’s parents would complain to him in disgust at regular intervals.
But at that age, anything older brothers did tended to look cool. It was the same for Geonshin. Without exaggeration, everything Changmin did looked good to him.
On top of that, Changmin had passion in his own way. Even Geonshin, who was only a middle schooler just beginning to grow up, could recognize his determination. That was how sincere Changmin was about architecture.
So it was no coincidence that Geonshin slowly began to grow his own dream of architecture while watching him. If anyone deserved the most credit for turning his dream into winning the Pritzker Prize, it was unquestionably Changmin.
But attending university in Seoul was not easy, neither then nor now. Changmin was a poor university student who could only attend the next semester after barely earning enough tuition money during vacation. Because of that, he often came home late after working part-time jobs here and there.
At the time, Geonshin did not even know what kind of part-time work Changmin was doing.
Changmin kept his mouth shut about the hard work he did because it was “uncool,” and Geonshin himself had not been very interested in such matters either.
Then one day…
June 29, 1995.
There were about 1,500 people inside Sampoong Department Store.
Was it not said that disasters had warning signs?
That day, the air-conditioning equipment in the first-floor kitchenware store had broken down, so the employees were busy washing their faces again and again with cold water.
Then, at 9 a.m.
A restaurant owner on the fifth floor noticed a two-centimeter raised section in the floor and that the ceiling had sagged slightly.
Around ten o’clock, an employee on the fourth floor felt strong vibrations for three minutes. A few hours later, water began pouring from the ceiling, and the floor began to sink.
But people did not evacuate. The signs of collapse had already begun, yet without anyone saying that they should evacuate, the critical window slipped away.
And on that day, at that hour.
Changmin was also inside Sampoong Department Store.
He was working there, receiving goods and diligently moving them down to the basement storage room. The weather was unusually hot that day.
An ordinary day, like always.
Changmin kept washing his face in the basement restroom, trying to rinse away the sweat pouring down his body. Then, looking at his own face reflected in the mirror, he grinned.
What could that smile have meant?
But he never had the chance to explain it.
Because that was the final moment of his life.
Boom!
As a thunderous sound began pouring down from the ceiling, debris collapsing from above swallowed one architecture student, along with everyone else there.
At last, the columns could no longer support the slabs, causing a chain collapse in an instant.
It had taken a long time for Sampoong Department Store to be completed, but the accumulated shoddy construction needed only a moment.
Geonshin, who was sixteen at the time, watched the tragedy unfold on TV in full. Families desperately searching for their missing loved ones as they dug through the collapsed debris with their bare hands.
Parents staring blankly because they had been unable to bring their young children out. Even a friend who had survived alone because they had been late for an appointment.
And his older cousin Changmin, who never came back…
When he came to his senses, he was at a joint memorial altar. Watching the wails of countless people he had only ever seen on TV, Geonshin clearly witnessed how the twisted desires of a few could destroy the daily lives of so many.
It was another tragedy that had happened less than a year after Seongsu Bridge collapsed.
As always, the wreckage of shoddy construction destroyed the everyday lives of innocent people.
The conclusion of this disaster, which caused around 1,500 casualties, took an unexpected turn. With no one clearly taking responsibility, it ended with short prison sentences and fines for most of those involved, excluding only a few.
What the people who built Sampoong Department Store had done was ignore principles.
To cut costs, they removed columns or reduced their diameter by twenty-five percent. On top of that, they forced through expansions beyond the standard.
Naturally, the reason they casually ignored the principles was money.
It was the moment when the spirit of the era, “you live well by saving,” became cost-cutting that crossed the boundaries of the law however it pleased.
Even after Geonshin began working in architecture, things like this happened all the time.
Even before his regression, the outer wall of an apartment building under construction had collapsed in an instant, and a building being demolished had fallen onto a road.
They were disasters caused by construction costs growing poorer and poorer as the main contractor assigned the work, the subcontractor hired another subcontractor, and margins were skimmed away again and again in the process.
‘As material prices skyrocketed, they started putting in only six or seven rebar pieces where ten should have gone, or they saved a ridiculous amount of materials while building. If they didn’t, the subcontractors wouldn’t be able to carry out the work. Even the inspectors were turning a blind eye, so what could we do?’
‘Hey, when they pressure us from above to shorten the construction period, what can we do? In winter, the temperature is low, so we have to use hot-air work to make the concrete cure and harden quickly. But that takes time too, and then it costs more money. And if we do it by the book, what do they say? They say there’s no money to give us. If they tell us to do it, we do it. What power do we have? That’s why the cement bursts before it’s even fully dried and the gang form collapses. I knew that apartment was going to have an accident someday.’
Even in an age when times had changed, technology had advanced, and someone was trying to realize a plan for people to live on Mars, cold concrete still collapsed in vain. And the excuses that followed were always the same.
Whenever that happened, people died.
Safety numbness.
People do not know the fear behind the word “surely.” The butterfly effect caused by a single sentence like, “Surely, that can’t happen,” always ended in horrifying disaster.
But sometimes, the word “surely” also became a way to defend one’s own irresponsibility.
“Surely, I didn’t know it would happen.”
But who would commit such things because they wanted to?
This misuse and abuse of “surely” created numbness toward safety.
Starting with the final survivor, it took a full year to clear away and organize the wreckage of the Sampoong Department Store disaster piece by piece. As they smashed apart huge lumps of cement and hauled them away by truck day after day, the traces of the disaster disappeared before long.
But what vanished in that time was not only the broken chunks of cement.
The memory of the tragedy vanished with them.
After one year, the Seoul city government opened public bidding again, and a certain company won the land again for about 250 billion won.
Five years passed that way.
In 2002, after regressing, Geonshin stood before the collapse site where Changmin slept.
He wondered what it would have been like if he had regressed to the very day of the accident back then, but it was a meaningless thought.
He shook his head and silently watched the site, which was no longer a department store.
There, tower cranes that seemed to pierce the sky kept lifting materials, and trucks loaded with cement entered the construction site after receiving the signalman’s signs. Their huge wheels kicked up sandy dust and blocked Geonshin’s view.
At the place where many people had died and been injured, a mixed-use apartment complex was now under construction.
A golden plot of land in Seocho-dong, Seoul. This place, close to Gyodae Station, would one day become the preserve of the so-called upper class, with its highest floors reaching thirty-seven stories and prices exceeding fifty million won per pyeong.
And the memorial tower for Sampoong Department Store, which should have stood there, was pushed away to Yangjae Citizen’s Forest, six kilometers from the site.
The bereaved families’ plan to build it on the land where the building had collapsed was canceled because of opposition from nearby residents.
The reason was that it would lower housing prices.
Thinking of Changmin, who had never returned, Geonshin had protested together with the victims’ families, demanding proper punishment for those responsible and that the memorial be built in its rightful place. But all that came back was sneering ridicule, asking whether they were doing it for money.
As if wanting to commemorate the victims was just a way for the victims’ families to make money…
As Geonshin grew older and became worn down by work, whenever he passed this road, he would forget completely that this place had been the site of a tragedy because of the splendor of the apartments. This place, once filled with people’s screams and wails, had remained as real estate of enormous asset value and become an object of people’s envy.
Geonshin had returned after learning the bitter taste of life. As the site of the tragedy he had forgotten was being erased piece by piece, he could only beat his chest with a heavy heart.
Because in his own memory, Changmin too had gradually disappeared.
Spaces for remembrance had been thoroughly cut off from people’s daily lives.
Even though this was not even a graveyard where the dead had been buried.
This was the very place Geonshin had chosen as the theme for the architecture competition: Seocho-dong 1685-3, Seocho-gu, Seoul.
No matter what he did, construction that had already begun would not stop.
Still, doing nothing while merely hoping for change felt like it would make the meaning of his regression fade.
‘Shouldn’t I at least throw an egg at it?’
At that moment, a status window appeared before Geonshin’s eyes.
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[Pritzker Prize-Winning Project.]
Goal: 100 Lv (6/100 Lv)
- Upon completing 10 Lv, the Scale Bar ability will be awarded.
Upon winning the grand prize: 4 Lv
Mission 3. Win the Grand Prize at the Korea Architecture Competition.
Reward: Creativity 10 SP (15/100 SP), Skill 10 SP (15/100 SP)
Attachment: 10 coupons for use of a 3-terabyte folder.
====================================
As Geonshin studied the status window carefully, his eyes naturally went to the newly added line.
‘When 10 Lv is completed, something called [Scale] will be awarded? So aside from Skill and Creativity, there are also abilities given as the Pritzker Prize level accumulates… Maybe special skills are given every 10 levels? Scale, huh. What kind of ability is that supposed to be? Well, whatever it is, if I get a new ability, I’m thankful.’
When Geonshin saw the status window, confidence welled up inside him. Perhaps it was because he had begun to believe that even his small ability could gradually change the future.
Even if it was only a public competition, if he won the grand prize, his work would be exhibited at the Seoul Arts Center. It might become a good opportunity to make people reflect on the issue once again.
The biggest variable was how the judges would accept this sensitive matter.
That was all.
‘Still, I can’t give up. Even if I have to use every skill I have, I have no choice but to make a work with meaning.’
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