I thought I was done with posting about Korea, but an article in today’s New York Times Magazine on the almost overnight births of new metropoli Shenzen and Dubai reminded me of a truly mindboggling architectural find from my time in Korea (April 23-May 8).

The article deals mostly with the massive highrise developments in these cities, but the situation bore many similarities to Korea; namely, incredibly rapid growth and a lack of a workable local vernacular from which to draw inspiration. From the article:

“The old contextual model is not very relevant anymore,” Jesse Reiser, an American architect working in Dubai, told me recently. “What context are we talking about in a city that’s a few decades old?”

Replace “city” with “country,” and you pretty much describe the situation in Korea. Granted, Korea does have plenty of ancient Buddhist temples and palaces, but before the war, it was a largely agrarian country, and pretty much anything “urban” was destroyed during the war. Thus, given a somewhat blank slate, this is what one Korean architect came up with:

Augh!! My eyes!!!

This was spotted in Kunsan, South Korea, a medium size city, but one that has also seen rapid growth in recent years.

The sign on the front says “Opera House Wedding Hall” in Korean (or should I say, Konglish). It’s someone architect’s terribly misguided effort at creating an elegant, European-style, sumptuous banquet hall to allow young couples to fulfill their westernized wedding ceremony fanatasies. It just unfolds in layer after layer of unrefined gaudiness.

Every time I see this building, it hurts me in some new way. Sometimes it’s the crazily repeated cheapo renditions of Italian cathedral domes. Other times it’s the oddly reflective/tinted windows. Maybe it’s the ridiculous trim on the windows. Whatever it is, for some reason, I found this thing so offensive to the architectural standards instilled in me by twenty six years of life in the US, four years of life in NYC, and one semester of Vincent Scully’s History of Modern Architecture at Yale.

I obviously chose an egregious example to get my point across, but I saw eyesores similar to the “opera house” across the country. Countless hotels looked like ersatz Disney castles. Church steeples made of nothing more than bare metal frames poked into skylines of all cities I saw while I was there. And there were even worse wedding halls that I didn’t capture on film.

But maybe I’m being too harsh. Another quote from an architect in the article struck me as particularly relevant:

“The vernacular is too faint, too precarious to become something on which you can base an architecture.”

What is the “vernacular” in Korea? Well, it’s this, and for whatever reason, Koreans haven’t been able to integrate it into modern architectural practice.

I will go out on a limb and say that, by and large, Koreans have done a poor job of adapting certain elements of Western vernacular architecture in their buildings. But should I fault them for trying? After all, they’re new at it. Americans have been doing it for 300 years; Koreans are a little late to the game.

Unfortunately, I’m not too optimistic about the future. The rest of the architecture that dominated Korea was largely in the form of repetitive, monotonous high rise apartment buildings that came straight out of Le Corbusier’s notebook:

I admit it; I’m a snob when it comes to this stuff. I adore the quaint brownstones of Brooklyn and parts of Manhattan. I rage at the new glass monstrosities that threaten the unique character of these old neighborhoods. But I know that Koreans don’t have the same reference points that I do. One high rise apartment complex in Seoul is even unironically named “Brownstone.” Few people in Korea really know what a real “brownstone” is.

So I guess I can forgive the high rises. And I could even see how someone might consider the above to be boring and monotonous.

But I can’t forgive the “Opera House.” I truly hope that I’ll go back to Kunsan several years later to find that the place has been razed to the ground.