We’d left Daejeon a few days ago already, but I just wanted to file the quick update. I got some great postcard-quality shots at an old Buddhist temple in the mountains outside of Daejeon, but unfortunately it looks like additional pictures will have to wait till I get back to the States.
The main takeaway from Daejeon, however, is not so much the old as it is the new. Daejeon only reinforced what I’d concluded previously, which is that the entire country is taken over by cookie cutter, seemingly prefabricated high rise apartment buildings. What’s even more strange about this is that there’s not much of a middle ground between extremely rural farmland and hyperdeveloped urban landscapes here. As I was discussing with friends, the “suburbs” that we think of in the United States are largely a US, Canada, and partially Western European phenomenon, simply because there’s no space for single family houses and yards in South Korea, only room for these Le Corbusian monstrosities.
I hope to write more about the architecture later and how it fits (or doesn’t fit) with American urbanization theories. Everything in the American canon says that these soulless buildings create ghettos without the social cohesion that typically holds together urban neighborhoods. But clearly, this is a radically different context, one that merits further analysis.
Next: Back to Seoul for the final leg of the trip.
