Hans Park: May 2006 Archives

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May 14, 2006

Confessions on a never published article

Sarcasm or proper discussion?

HANS: I think there are many ways to discuss the problems in this region. I find that there are no starting points, we only have these back-stabbing statements by some governmental ministers without having a clear goal and view how to resolve conflicts. We don't have a strong leadership in any of the countries in this region. Nobody is respected...

Maybe we need to start somewhere, and be it then a pool of suggestions for the Ryogyong hotel. We need to open up the game. We need to disucss issues, suggest ideas in various forums in my opinion. It feels like we have ran into a dead end and too tired to figure our way up the wall. The dead end creates opportunities for other forces and I'm afraid of Samsungs, Hyundais and alike, penetrating North Korea with their aim to develop yet another sweat shop country.

Therefore, finally, I believe our suggestion might be a bit out there, but when you really think about it...could it be done? Actually, I think it's a more sensible idea than many of those the Western leaders are coming up with for the world we live in.

DAVID: Of course there's a portion of sarcasm in the very idea of proposing conceptual solution for a space which is encircled by barbed wire and currently under control of one of the least friendly regimes on the face of the Earth. The ambiguity is present already in the formulation of the task as presented by Domus.

But my business is precisely with challenging pre-established patterns of political persuasion. I believe we – meaning we in the self-appointed developed and free world – are currently in a real danger of assuming certain values and certain forms of political arrangement for universally granted, for unshakeably given facts of human existence in all times and places. We seem to take for a natural law those entirely improbable developments which led through so many stumblings to the peculiar political forms of representational democracy combined with liberal checks on tyranny of democratic majority, all of that philosophically linked to the notion of autonomous individual as bearer of rights.

My studies in the past of political discourse all point me in the direction of disbelief that these developments were in any way inevitable. I see very little justification, based on what I know from that history, for the strange self-confidence that we, modern Westerners, are privileged owners of all the correct answers to the problem of how societies ought to be arranged and what their governments ought to be for. I see it as deeply worrying that some of our leaders actually appear to believe that we are justified in leading wars in the name of "freedom and democracy" as if those were not working descriptions of temporary arrangements, but god-revealed truths.

I hoped the admittedly provocative contribution we made could actually help render some of our pre-established notions less self-evident and more open to reflection and self-criticism. I'm aware some people may find this offensive or disrespectful with regard to the North Koreans, who actually have to put up with the whims of the strange regime in power there. I am firm that our work in no way amounts to a tacit endorsement of the regime, or to cynical disregard for the conditions of the population above 38°. Still, we really want to emphasize that any solution to this predicament is probably far less evident than we might think and than the rhetoric of some of our leaders might suggest.

The region and us

HANS: I guess a lot of the comments I have made so far are exactly based on the fact that I am raised in Sweden and Finland but feel that I have strong connections to Korea. I could not think of North Korea as just a black and white country with the "evil regime" only in mind and feel that solutions for these problems had more than two poles.

I believe, there can be many ways of opening up the border between South and North...and it doesn't help that Korean politicians are trying to get popular votes due to the issue with North Korea. Politicians whose only aim is the Nobel Peace Prize may not see a workable settlement for this region. I think one other key problem is the Korean media. Media is a strong force in South Korea that needs to be straightened up in in order to end up with sustainable solutions for the region, and to straighten up the media, we need to straighten up the educational system. These are the close issues for me concerning the fundamental differences between Sweden-Finland and Korea.

And, returning to the design, or the architectural values in this idea, I believe we need these landmarks, points in the space we live in, which actually represent values, especially in countries that are still struggling for a much much better future. Sadly, most of the landmarks become symbols of capitalism and are dressed up as ultra-boring shopping centres.

DAVID: After we had submitted our contribution, Domus published a bitterly angered reaction by a UK based Czech architect, who saw the competition as an irresponsible play of vaguely left-wing intellectualism, and accused the Italian editors of making light of the problem of authoritarian regimes from their comfortable vantage point of the rich democratic West. I am sure we would be caught in his line of fire. I can understand him, but remain unrepentant.

I am Czech, born in the Soviet bloc, and I still grew up aware of the nation-wide pretence and hypocrisy under conditions of a stupid and oppressive single-party rule. Do I need to say again that we wish in no way to downplay or tacitly justify the practices of regimes like that. But I have since lived in different cultural context and spoken a non-Indoeuropean language long enough to feel now that our particular experience of life beyond the Iron Curtain may just not be the best guide to understanding the world of today.

The Cold War mentality is based on a notion of clear-cut dichotomies, of black and white, of good and evil. I cannot see, though, how this type of mentality might help us understand and cope with, say, relationships among Japan, China, and the Koreas. In the world at large, I see other much more complex and ambiguous processes at work than an alleged struggle between goodies and baddies, "freedom loving peoples" and "corrupt regimes," and I just don't think this type of highfaluting rhetoric is going to get us anywhere.

The approach

HANS: The approach was definitely based on geopolitical considerations. The information about the building was very limited in terms of drawings and images, so we thought it would be more interesting and fitter to approach the whole thing from an ideological point of view. We felt that the building as it is now was a detached landmark that didn't live up to whatever "potential" it had.

We wanted to concentrate on the building in terms of content and how the content could affect the city, the country and the region. Aesthetics wasn't our main concern, we thought architecture as such was timeless in its own context and at this point didn't need to be addressed.

Also, we did not think much about how the the hotel is now being used. We acknowledged the landmark effect it had and the rigid and strong form it had, from there we started to develop the original idea.

DAVID: It was inconceivable to us from the very outset that the problem could be addressed on any terms devoid of politics. To be honest, it comes as a surprise that some of the participants did approach the task purely as a virtual exercise in architectural design completely apart from the geopolitical context.

The New Neutrality

Posted by hans at 10:14 PM | Comments (5)