Autumn in Namhan-San-Seong

Autumn is by far the most spectacular season in Korea, in my opinion. Since the 70% of Korea is mountainous, the transformation of color is quite dramatic. These photos were taken in Namhan-San-Seong Park, located about half-an-hour from Bundang where I live.

Growing up in Korea, going to visit Namhan-San-Seong always seemed to entail a long road trip to me, but I was shocked to see how close it had become. Seoul has expanded quite rapidly to the South since I last visited, and I now I find Namhan-San-Seong is actually between where I live, Bundang and Seoul itself.

My little ones are oblivious to these memories of Seoul’s past and present of course. As much as they seem permanent, cities do change. Both in our memory and physically.

More photos of Namhan-San-Seong in my Flickr set.

Hanoi, Vietnam

As part of my new job at JINA Architects, I visited Hanoi, Ha Phong and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam in late August. I wasn’t able to post about it since the Vietnamese government had yet to formally announce the winner of the international competition to formulate a new Master Urban Plan of Hanoi. I am happy to say that JINA, in a consortium with POSCO Engineering & Construction, a construction firm based in Korea and Perkins Eastman of the US, won the bid. I am now part of the team that will execute the project.

The first thing that strikes you in Hanoi is the traffic.

The motorcycles whizzing by in all directions, the constant beeping of all the vehicles, its apparent chaos exacerbated by the dearth traffic lights even at the heart of Hanoi, is overwhelming for the first time visitor. The motorcycle thing took a little getting used to. But since Hanoi has little public transportation infrastructure, and the price of fuel is pretty costly relative to the living standards, the plethora of two-wheeled traffic is understandable. Crossing the road is a hairy experience and literally reminded me of Frogger, the 80’s arcade game and the sobering experience of Seymore Papert, one of the founding faculty of the MIT Media Lab, who suffered brain damage after he was hit by a motorcycle while crossing the road in Hanoi a couple of years ago.

Once you get used to the traffic, you realize that this is a city on the verge of exploding. Vietnam has experience massive economic growth since Đổi mới (renovation), its embrace of free markets in 1986, and evidence of the growth can be seen in the city everywhere in poorly regulated new construction sprouting up like weeds.

The word for crisis in Chinese (which is also the same in Korean) is 危機. The first part 危 is the character for “danger”, where as the second part 機 is the character for opportunity. The crisis in Hanoi presents itself as a unique opportunity to do amazing things. Hanoi has a colorful history that dates back some 1000 years, which is when it was first established as a capital. You can still see Chinese and French influences, remnants from the war with the US (the “American War” as it is called in here), as well as more recent Soviet-era architecture imported in the post-war years. But all this is fast disappearing, and soon, without intervention, Hanoi is in danger of becoming yet another characterless modern Asian city. We’ve seen too many cities in Asia being all too eager to sacrifice their past heritage for looking modern and “developed” in the eyes of the world. Seoul, as we all know, was one of them.

Hanoi’s Ancient Quarter, a.k.a. “The 36 Streets” is a combination of market, street life and housing. According to some estimates a staggering half a million people pass through the quarter a day. It has traditionally been a place where family-based craft guilds established their presence in Hanoi. The French colonial rule and communist rule following the unification of Vietnam wiped out most of the traditional guilds, but you still see strong grouping of business by produce around the quarter.

I couldn’t figure out how this run-down market could attract so much people and traffic during all hours of the day. After I returned and read some more material about the Ancient Quarter, I discovered that it has one of the highest population density in Asia. The narrow 2-3 story storefronts hide “tube houses” that may be as deep as 100m, and home to as many as 50 people.

Another striking feature of Hanoi is water. Hanoi in Chinese means “between the rivers”, and the Red River surrounds the city. There are also two major and many minor lakes and ponds scattered around Hanoi. Tay Ho is the biggest, but Hoan Kiem is the most beloved, with its legend of a turtle that delivered a sword that brought victory to Le Loi during his revolt against the Ming Dynasty. Hanoi is indeed a city of water.

Van Mieu or the Temple of Literature dates back to 1070, and is an island of serenity in a sea of traffic and construction chaos.

Although this was my first visit to Hanoi, as a Korean and East Asian, I found Hanoi strangely familiar. It was hard to place my finger on what exactly this feeling was, but having experience rapid growth and development (and my fair share of disorientation) in Seoul, Hanoi reminded me of Seoul of the 70’s and 80’s. But that wasn’t all of it. It was a strange familiarity that was akin to, in some ways, to meeting for the first time a cousin that one has never met before: There was something in Hanoi that was already in me.

Hanoi has all the potential of becoming a truly great and beautiful city. It has a raw and yet sophisticated charm, having been layered by so many rich cultures, and imbued with natural beauty of waters and its immediate surroundings. It’s already all there. All it needs is a careful polishing.

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Here’s all the photos posted to Flickr from my August 27-30, 2008 trip to Vietnam.

From the World Bank Flickr account

Given the size, complexity and issues surrounding the World Bank (not to mention its impossible mandate of “Working for a World Free of Poverty”), it does surprise me how well it does things sometimes.

Case in point: the World Bank has a Flickr account! It has over 1,400 photos, nicely categorized into 3 collections (Africa, South Asia, East Asia) and 33 sets (that cover selected topics and countries).

Did I tell you that they also have an API to access their 114 indicators from key data sources and 12,000 development photos? This is too much. The Bank (as it is affectionately called to insiders) is more Web2.0 that a whole lot of organizations.

[Thx AC]

Lille Grande Palais/Congrexpo, Lille, France (Rem Koolhaas, OMA)

Photo taken in 1995, shortly after Lille Grande Palais / Congrexpo in Lille, France was completed. Designed by Rem Koolhaas/OMA.

Artwork at 798, Beijing

Although I have visited Hong Kong, this was my first trip to mainland China. My first impressions of Beijing was one of scale: We entered through the new Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital International Airport, designed by Foster + Partners and ARUP. The building is said to represent a dragon in motion, with its undulating roofline. Stepping through the passport control, you see the building on axis for the first time and the way the columns extend out reminded me of drawings of the Italian Futurist Antonio Sant’Elia at the turn of the century, in the way it celebrates modern transportation infrastructure. According to Sir Norman Foster in a presentation at the DLD Conference, Munich in 2007:

[The new Terminal 3] is physically the largest building on the planet at the moment… larger by 17% than every terminal put together at Heathrow [London].

The scale of the building is also reinforced on the exterior, by using an optical illusion to make the building seem stretch out into the vanishing point.

As we were landing at the airport the pilot informed us that there was about a 3 mile visibility. I thought it rather odd that he was disclosing this information, the first time I’d ever heard it being mentioned inflight. Driving from the airport to downtown, I realized why this information was relevant. Although it was a clear day, there was a haze all around. "Yellow dust" or "hwang-sa" is what they call it in Korea. It’s the dust being blown across East Asia from China’s Gobi desert (See NOAA satellite photo).

Although the trip was primarily business-related, I did get a chance to visit a few local attractions. The Grand National Theatre of China in Beijing, was designed by French architect Paul Andreu, and completed in Dec 2007 after 6 years of construction.

It’s huge - the dome houses 3 freestanding building inside it: the opera, theatre and concert hall. They didn’t allow any cameras through security (but they did allow cellphones with cameras) so I wasn’t able to take any interior photos.

The entrance goes under the moat surrounding the building and you can look up through glass at the water as you enter the building. The dome surrounded by a moat make the building an easy target to be called a "egg" - a fried egg in this case.

798 Art District in Northeast Beijing is a thriving artist community, studios and galleries housed in former weapons factory. The "798" comes from the factory number.

The Chinese government seems to give artist a lot of breathing space these days, allowing open criticism of the government, its open market policies and the negative effects of capitalism on their society. In a way, Chinese artists have it easy, since they have an easy focal point upon which they can base their creative energy, unlike art in the west, which has lost its ideological focus and now can only resort to critiquing itself. My friend put it nicely: it seemed like the Chinese artists were like students in art school, trying to find their voice, uninhibited and full of raw energy.

When we visited it was under heavy construction and renovation in preparation for the tourists that are going to flood Beijing around the Olympic Games this summer. It a shame that the artistic character of area will soon be gentrified beyond all recognition. It will be yet another Soho, Greenwich Village or Williamsburg in New York, now full of galleries and shops with few traces of the artists who pioneered the neighborhood and made it possible.

One thing I found missing from Beijing that I expected was the presence of bicycles. I always remember photos of large cities in China full of masses of people riding bicycles. My friend told me when he first visited Beijing 10 years ago, there were thousands of bicycles on the streets, but now it’s hard to see any due to the ban on bicycles that has gradually been enforced since 1998. They say that China is the faster growing market in automobile sales, and public transportation infrastructure is growing. However I can’t imagine the effects of all those people switching to carbon producing cars will benefit the already fragile state of China’s environment.