No life is exempt from scars. Across cultures, people have long sought ways to live with them. In Japan, the art of “kintsugi” adorns a fractured vessel with gold, transforming the damage into conspicuous beauty and allowing it to continue its life. In contrast, Korea's tradition of repairing “onggi,” traditional earthenware vessels, restores them to everyday use while usually leaving their scars visible. Years ago, I encountered this same question not in a piece of pottery, but in a city.
One early autumn, I stood before the Darmstadtium, a gentle breeze drifting through the square. The modern center was designed to embrace the weathered remnants of the German city of Darmstadt's 14th-century city wall, one end of which is seamlessly integrated into the structure.
Across the street stood the Residential Palace, its origins dating back to the Middle Ages. After the devastation of World War II, its buildings were reconstructed from salvaged stone fragments, preserving as much of their historic fabric as possible. Its reflection shimmered across the Darmstadtium's glass facade beneath the golden light of late afternoon.
The overlapping layers of time were mesmerizing. It was as if the city were writing a sentence through its spaces, one that read like a pieta toward the vanishing, the scarred and the obsolete. Not to explain away, but to keep them close.
I wandered farther along the street, pondering whether the way people shape the spaces they inhabit ultimately reveals how they choose to live. Before long, I realized I had entered a university campus.
There was no gate to pass through, no wall to mark where the university grounds began. The casual steps of passersby and the lingering conversations of students shared the same turf, blending into a fluid rhythm.
Such an ethos was not new. In the 1890s, Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse envisioned a world where the boundaries separating art from everyday life and architecture from craft would be dissolved. Hoping to revitalize an ossified society and stimulate the local economy, he established an artists' colony at Darmstadt's Mathildenhohe. Here, architecture and landscape were conceived as a unified whole, with buildings, gardens, pathways, fountains and sculptures woven into a single artistic composition.
Centuries earlier and half a world away, Soswaewon, a 16th-century private garden retreat in Damyang County, South Jeolla Province, gave form to another possibility for how architecture, human life and nature might coexist.
Beyond the bamboo grove lining both sides of the entrance path lies a pavilion. This retreat was built by a brilliant scholar who, having lost his revered teacher to political turmoil, chose never to return to public life.
With their doors lifted to the rafters, the pavilions invite the garden scenery and the surrounding forest inside. Nearby, a stone wall hovers above a rushing stream on natural pillars, gracefully yielding its boundary so that nature may flow uninterrupted.
Yet here, the walls also make room for privacy and consideration. The approach to the garden unfolds gradually, allowing both host and guest a quiet moment before they meet. The walls rise only high enough to preserve privacy, but remain low enough for another's presence to be felt beyond them. Private worlds are respected, yet remain part of a shared one.
Recently, an article naming Seoul the best city to visit for Gen Z travelers brought back memories of a dinner in Berlin a decade ago. A Humboldt University flatmate once asked if Seoul was truly filled with skyscrapers so tall one had to tilt one’s head back to see their tops, seemingly doubtful it could be as developed as she had heard. Looking back at the sheer wonder on her face as she stared at Google Images, I am struck by how differently the world sees Seoul today.
What, then, makes Seoul a truly attractive place? And through its physical spaces, what story is the city telling us now?
Granting Manfredo Tafuri’s premise that modern urban space cannot escape the social and economic mechanisms of capital, it is perhaps unsurprising that the ways a city is built and shaped are constrained by those same forces, and that the city itself functions as an object of consumption and a stage for the proliferation of disposable aesthetics. Seoul is no exception.
Yet a city also reveals its values through the choices made within these constraints — what to preserve, what to build and where to draw or soften its boundaries. In the end, the spaces we design are never neutral. They are the silent, material vessels of our deepest values, whispering about the kind of life we believe is worth living.
- - -
Bae Su-kyeong
Bae Su-kyeong is a freelance journalist. The views expressed here are the writer’s own. — Ed.
khnews@heraldcorp.com
