Chapter 39. Binjoga (貧找家)
Geonshin looked at the contractor’s employee and spoke.
“This restaurant currently has twenty four-person tables, giving you eighty seats in total. If we assume all those tables are grilling meat at the same time, aren’t the ducts currently installed in the ceiling nowhere near sufficient? I think the ceiling fans should have an outer diameter of about 450 mm, but the ones installed now are only 320 mm.”
At Geonshin’s words, the contractor’s employee raised the corners of his eyes.
“Ducts? Ceiling ducts are always done like that. Those fans are plenty big enough too. I guess you’re saying this because you’re a student and don’t know how things work in the field. You’ll understand once you actually get out onto a job site later, so why don’t you just go back and finish your food?”
“Then let’s check something.”
Geonshin switched on every duct system installed in the kitchen.
A loud noise erupted along with heavy vibration.
“Look at this. You undersized the ducts that exhaust smoke from the dining area, then installed only high-powered duct motors, so all you’ve done is increase the noise and vibration. The entrance door was hard to open when I came in earlier too. Isn’t that because the air inside isn’t circulating properly? You probably installed exhaust only and didn’t install separate supply-air vents, did you?”
The interior employee went speechless as though he had frozen solid.
His plan had been to charge more construction fees later for adding duct lines and supply-air vents, yet some random student had uncovered it.
Still, he forced himself to hide his flustered expression and opened his mouth.
“No, that’s not it. The supply vents are….”
“And the kitchen is a more serious problem. With the serving hatch as the reference point, the cooking equipment should be on the left and the dish-return equipment on the right, but you’ve got them reversed. That must be pretty inconvenient, isn’t it, ma’am?”
“Ah! Yes. Yes, it is. Whenever we’re working, I keep bumping into the kitchen staff. I knew something felt strange.”
The owner immediately agreed with Geonshin and began glaring at the interior employee.
It was exactly the same expression she had worn before his regression when she had complained to him about the broken duct.
“And ma’am, your table arrangement is inefficient too. Even with the same eighty seats, if you arrange them horizontally like this, the tables in the back end up too close together and it becomes inconvenient to get to the restroom. Try rearranging them like this instead.”
Geonshin handed the owner a sheet of paper.
On it was a well-planned table arrangement oriented vertically, along with duct lines reorganized to match it.
It even included the measurements he had confirmed using the Scale item.
“This is something the employee here should fix for you. It looks like he was the one who installed all of this.”
But upon hearing that, the interior employee’s face flushed red and his voice rose.
“What are you talking about? If we’re going to do all that, we need to charge extra. Quit nitpicking every little thing so you can beat the price down. Some brat who isn’t even dry behind the ears thinks he knows….”
The moment the words extra charge left his mouth, the owner turned pale.
She had opened this restaurant using money from her housing deposit.
She had already poured all her money into the place. She was short on cash as it was, and if the interior company began stubbornly insisting that this and that required additional fees, there was very little she could do.
Leaving the poorly vented smell and inconvenient traffic flow as they were would obviously hurt her business.
“Ma’am, you received an estimate from this man, didn’t you? Could I take a look at it?”
“Uh, sure, student. It’s over there at the counter. But can you actually tell anything from looking at it? I couldn’t make heads or tails of the thing.”
“I probably won’t be able to tell much myself, but one of our professors came from JAD. They’re considered the best interior design firm in the country, so I can probably show it to him later when he checks my assignment in class.”
‘What? JAD?’
JAD.
The largest interior design company in Korea.
It had been created by a major conglomerate to directly handle interior design for the group’s various affiliates, including hotels and cosmetics franchises.
At this time, being from JAD carried enough prestige that wealthy madams practically lined up to hire its alumni for interior work.
Of course, Geonshin was lying to intimidate the employee, but since his professor was currently collaborating with JAD, it was not completely unrelated nonsense either.
The moment Geonshin invoked the name of a whale in the industry, the employee began shrinking like a shrimp.
Before Geonshin’s regression, things like this had rarely happened.
By simply going online, people could quickly obtain competing estimates. Tricks like secretly adding their own markup onto workers’ daily wages or inflating quantities no longer worked.
Interior companies separately listed their discounted margins on estimates and specified the money that had to be paid to subcontractors.
But things were different now, after his regression.
Around the period before and after the year 2000, most people did not even know how much an interior company kept for itself or how it made that profit.
As a result, plenty of interior companies regularly played games with the numbers. They might list a different amount from what they had actually paid the carpenters, or overstate material and labor costs and receive part of the money back.
Ordinary people had difficulty discovering traps in an estimate.
And even if they showed the estimate to another company, the original contractor could simply deny everything on the grounds that they were being asked to reveal their own business secrets.
But standing here was Na Geonshin, a regressor with twenty years of experience.
Geonshin took the estimate and quickly skimmed through it.
Of course, he did not know the exact labor and material prices of 2002, so he could not verify everything precisely.
Still, some errors were obvious at a glance.
A dumbfounded chuckle escaped him.
“I checked the ceiling fans installed here earlier, and their outer diameter is 320 mm…. But the estimate lists 450 mm fans. It also says you installed two more of them, so even the quantity is wrong.
“And just looking at the dimensions of the interior here, the long side is listed as 19,925 mm. That means each run of ductwork should be less than 19,925 mm long, so why is the listed quantity so absurdly large? There are only two runs up there on the ceiling.
“A Y-Branch? I don’t know where you supposedly installed this either, but it’s listed on the estimate too. Did I somehow fail to find it?
“Anyway, even I can spot this much. If my professor looks at it, this is going to get ugly, don’t you think?”
It was a rapid-fire barrage of facts from Geonshin.
The interior employee’s face turned yellow, and as he mumbled incoherently, the owner reacted first.
She had always been quick-tempered.
She immediately grabbed the employee by the collar and screamed loudly enough to shake the restaurant.
“You bastard! Do you have any idea what money I used to open this place!? How dare you screw around with me!? You rotten bastards! Come on. We’re going to the police station!”
“No, no, that’s not it. Ma’am, please calm down for a moment. I’ll bring the estimate again. I’ll bring it again. There must’ve been some kind of mistake.”
Even deceiving people required a little intelligence.
If they had padded labor costs or material prices, they could at least have tried to argue about it.
But incorrect quantities could be checked directly.
Trying to pull such a clumsy scam was absurd.
Even if the police simply came and checked the installed quantities, the inflated construction costs would obviously be exposed in no time. And if she obtained a comparison estimate through a professor on top of that, they would have absolutely no way out.
In the end, as an apology, the interior company agreed to refund the entire construction cost and take responsibility for redoing the work.
With right and wrong so clearly established, there was no room for argument.
Of course, Geonshin did not think even that was enough.
He intended to gather documents containing comparison estimates along with their fraudulent estimate and hand them over to the owner.
No matter what era this was, they should have known where to draw the line.
It was time to deliver a genuine “real-life consequences” punch.
Anyway, after the matter was settled like that,
the owner grabbed Geonshin’s hand in gratitude.
“Thank you, student. You saved me.”
“No. I’m the one who should be more grateful.”
“Huh? Why would you be grateful to me? You mean because I gave you some food on the house? Good grief.”
“Hahaha. That too, but… anyway, there was something I owed you thanks for. Ah, there’ll probably be a lot of apartment complexes built around this school. So I think it would be good if you didn’t move somewhere else and kept running this place here for a long time.”
This was the final kindness that Na Geonshin, a regressor whose life was changing because of her, could offer.
If she kept her ears open and listened carefully, perhaps one day it would return to her as a great reward.
“Huh. This empty wasteland is going to turn into something like that? Well, that’d be great for me.”
She did not seem entirely convinced, but what did it matter?
The choice was hers.
The owner tried not to accept payment for the meat, but Geonshin firmly refused and paid the bill.
What he had already received through his regression was worth so much that even after repaying her, he would still have change left over.
Whether it was the electrocution accident or the regression itself, the woman certainly had not intended any of it.
Still, Geonshin felt he should repay her in his own way.
‘That broken duct. I’m glad I finally got to take a look at it for her.’
A while later.
The Korea Architecture Competition exhibition finally opened at the Seoul Arts Center.
During the three-day exhibition, many people visited, from the winners’ families to their school friends.
Geonshin’s parents also came, looking at his work and sharing in the joy of his award.
When Geonshin had first said he was going into architecture, his mother had briefly tried to dissuade him because it brought thoughts of the deceased Changmin back to her.
But now that she had come all the way here and saw the work Geonshin had created, her eyes soon reddened.
After all, to her too, Changmin had been like a son, a nephew she had personally cooked meals for over a long period of time.
Perhaps that was why unusually many reporters visited this particular exhibition.
It was because of Geonshin’s work.
Once reporters introduced Geonshin’s controversial piece in a corner of their newspapers, people began coming in large numbers.
It was a sea of people.
The exhibition became such a tremendous success that one had to wonder whether this many non-architects had ever come to the Korea Architecture Competition before.
People applauded judging chair Seung Yugyeol for boldly selecting the controversial work for the Grand Prize.
Of course, once the media began discussing the disaster again, some construction companies expressed their displeasure toward him.
But perhaps because his convictions were so firm, he paid little attention no matter what anyone said.
Given everything that had happened, Seung Yugyeol could not dismiss his meeting with Geonshin as a mere coincidence.
“So you’re the one who submitted that troublesome piece.”
“Yes. Thank you for choosing it.”
“But why did you deliberately draw it in pencil? Students these days seem busy showing off every new digital technology they can get their hands on.”
“Computers clearly allow us to move beyond some of architecture’s limitations. But I thought it would be meaningless if the work merely became a way of boasting, ‘Look what a computer can do.’
“And I decided that pencil suited the muted, heavy feeling of that reed field better than computer technology did.”
“How do you think that affected the judging?”
“I’m not sure…. I was simply inspired by the feeling of ink-and-light-color wash painting I sensed in your work Binjoga (貧找家). A ‘house filled with utterly empty space (空, emptiness)’ was the motif I had in mind for the memorial space.”
At that, Seung Yugyeol’s expression changed subtly.
The unexpected revelation had startled him inwardly.
‘How does this kid know one of my early works? There should hardly be any material on it!’
Binjoga (貧找家) was one of Seung Yugyeol’s earliest works.
It was a house he had designed when he first opened his private atelier, taking almost no design fee because he needed publicity.
The work carried great meaning for Seung Yugyeol as well, because it too had strongly embodied the idea of mourning.
If things had gone as originally expected, architect Seung Yugyeol should have succeeded Kim Suin, the first head of Yeongjo Architecture, and become its second head.
But after Kim Suin, who had been his teacher at the time, passed away, Seung Yugyeol became disgusted with the power struggles that erupted among his disciples.
So he yielded the position to the senior colleague who had the least ambition to become head and left Yeongjo Architecture.
The first building he designed after leaving was Binjoga.
His teacher, the man who had awakened him to the way of architecture, was dead.
And with that death, the time he had spent walking the same road with his companions seemed to disappear as well.
Seung Yugyeol could not help but mourn that loss.
The emptiness and sorrow he felt were profound.
Feeling as though he had lost so much in a single instant, Seung Yugyeol poured the meaning of mourning into Binjoga.
He hoped that the empty spaces within the house would be filled by the heart of the person who lived there.
Given that history, it was only natural that seeing Geonshin’s work would shock him.
The image of the Memorial Park looked like a faded black-and-white photograph.
It was no coincidence that Seung Yugyeol had been so strongly drawn to Geonshin’s work.
Looking at it awakened memories of old projects he had long forgotten, immersing him in nostalgia for the past.
Of course, it was also no coincidence that Geonshin had used Seung Yugyeol’s Binjoga as a motif for his own work.
Geonshin already knew all of those private stories.
After the connecting-bridge design pool had wrapped up, Director Yoo-uk had gotten drunk at a company dinner, grabbed Geonshin, and repeated stories just like these over and over again.
Director Yoo-uk also loved Seung Yugyeol’s architecture, so he knew nearly everything there was to know about him.
On top of that, most of the stories exchanged when directors drank together were heroic tales of Yeongjo Architecture’s former heads, passed down almost like legends within the company.
It was Yeongjo’s history, known in detail by those who knew where to look.
Yeongjo Architecture also had an archive containing most domestic architectural works, so analyzing Seung Yugyeol’s Binjoga was hardly difficult.
In any case, thanks to Geonshin, Seung Yugyeol remembered the convictions of his younger days.
Smiling, he offered Geonshin a handshake.
“I think I made the right choice by casting one vote for your courage.”
Seung Yugyeol then turned around and began walking away.
But before he had taken more than a few steps, he suddenly looked back at Geonshin.
A peculiar premonition had risen in his chest.
‘I have a feeling I’ll be meeting that young man again out in the field before long.’
But no one can know the future.
Seung Yugyeol gave a faint chuckle and resumed walking.
In any case, on the final day of the exhibition, several family members of victims of the Sampoong Department Store disaster came to the exhibition hall.
The mass media had been debating Geonshin’s work so fiercely that they heard the news and came to see it themselves.
When they found the names of their children, parents, and friends in Geonshin’s Memorial Park, their eyes ultimately filled with tears.
Everything they had wanted so desperately was contained intact within a single work.
They could no longer create a memorial park like this, but they were grateful that someone remembered the disaster and still sympathized with the injustice they felt.
In that way, memories of the disaster that had dulled considerably over six years began to sprout anew through architecture.
‘If people continue paying attention to this sprout and watching over it, couldn’t that help prevent future disasters?’
Geonshin’s work set off a kind of enormous butterfly effect.
Eventually, after the Korea Architecture Competition, the Seoul Metropolitan Government decided to relocate the memorial monument that had been hidden deep inside Yangjae Citizens’ Forest to a high point in Seoripul Park, opposite the site of the disaster.
The continuing articles and renewed public attention had brought the matter back to the table.
Once the memorial monument was completed, visitors leaving it would naturally look upon the site of the disaster every time they departed.
‘If it can become an opportunity for everyone to resolve never to let a disaster like this happen again, perhaps the scars in their hearts will slowly begin to fade.’
At the school library, Geonshin looked up articles about the memorial monument.
Since his regression, the projects he carried out with sincerity had begun changing the future little by little.
The more that happened, the more Geonshin realized that he could never abandon serious reflection about architecture.
‘Every time I work on a project, the city of the future will probably diverge a little from the future that was originally set. Like opening a blocked meridian, if things don’t become better because of it, then my architecture has no meaning.’
Geonshin looked through the library window at the layers of green mountains beyond it.
How many places in the entire world allowed someone to see mountain ridges with that kind of graceful flow from inside a building?
But…
‘Someday those mountains will be hidden behind apartment buildings too.’
Thinking about the city becoming a paradise of apartments suddenly made Geonshin feel stifled.
Even so, he resolved that if he could improve the cityscape even slightly, he would do whatever he could.
‘The next chapter will be important if I’m going to resolve this suffocating feeling.’
After all, all the preparations for joining Yeongjo Architecture were now complete.
Leave a Reply