A huge lizard creeping along the ruins of the old wall of Seoul or a UFO bisected upon landing near the East Gate: These are some of the rather queer impressions people have of the Dongdaemun Design Plaza now under construction at the site of the East Gate Stadium. 

Under the scorching sun, workers are wrapping the curved outer walls of the structure with silvery metal panels, leaving the roof sections to be covered with grass. The plaza is one of the three main design projects of former Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon, along with the New City Hall building and the Saebit Dungdungseom floating islets moored in the Han River.

The former mayor resigned in the middle of his second term when a municipal referendum he called did not give him enough support for his rejection of free school meals pushed by a leftist-controlled city council. He may consider himself as having been martyred for the conservative cause, but people, be they Seoul residents or not, have lost the target to deliver their complex feelings about the disturbing outcomes of Oh’s six-year-long administration.

It is explained that the overall configuration of the New City Hall depicts the protruding eaves of a traditional Korean house, but the 13-story glass and steel structure drew unfavorable reactions from an overwhelming majority of citizens in a recent survey. The design was the result of nearly three years of tussle between the city’s screening committee and the central government’s Cultural Heritage Administration, but everyone readily identifies it with the departed mayor.

The Saebit floating islets, which replaced the aborted opera house project on Jungjido Island in the middle of the First Hangang Bridge, has a clearer Oh Se-hoon signature. Designed to be used for conventions and exhibitions, cultural entertainment, and water sports and leisure, the facilities were completed last year. Yet, a special audit directed by new Mayor Park Won-soon resulted in the punishment of 15 city officials for serious negligence in executing the project from contracting to financing.

Let’s now go back to the Dongdaemun Design Plaza. In recent years, the area around the East Gate or the Heunginji-mun has undergone a tremendous transformation as the capital city’s core of traditional commerce was changed to a cluster of high-rise shopping centers catering to younger consumers and foreign tourists.

The removal of the municipal stadiums in 2007 ended the nostalgic history of the capital city’s main sports arena, which was first built by the Japanese colonialists in the early 1920s. Following the 1945 liberation, the Kyeongseong (Keijo) Sports Field became Seoul Stadium, which was used not only for major athletic events but for various political and cultural rallies. Renamed Dongdaemun Stadium, it saw the launching of the President Park Chung-hee Cup Asian Soccer Tournament in 1971 and the Korean Professional Baseball League in 1982.

The Dongdaemun Stadium gradually lost its importance as Korea hosted the 1988 Summer Olympics and the center of sports activities moved to the new Jamsil complex. From the late 1990s, Seoul City began studying plans to turn the site of the sports complex into a public park. Shortly after taking office in 2006, Mayor Oh conducted an international contest for the planning of the park and chose the entry of Zaha Hadid, an Iraqi-born British architect who trained and works in Rotterdam and London.

Oh’s idea of Dongdaemun Design Plaza & Park is a large urban development project to consist of a multi-use park, a historical museum, a fashion plaza, and an underground mall. The mayor applied to the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design to get Seoul’s designation as the “World Design Capital” for 2010, the year when the plaza was scheduled to be completed.

Many wonder how Oh Se-hoon, a jurist who practiced law in Seoul until he was recruited by the opposition Grand National Party to run for the National Assembly in 2000, became very engrossed in improving the metropolitan design as his administrative theme. Some suspect that he might have emulated his predecessor Lee Myung-bak whose signature Cheonggyecheon stream restoration project helped catapult him to the presidency.

Anyway, he hoped to make Dongdaemun the fashion hub of Korea. Zaha Hadid’s blueprints contained a fashion design information center, seminar and lecture halls and a number of exhibition halls for various corporate design products. However, actual construction faced the difficult problem of accommodating the demands of merchants who had long engaged in business around the old stadium. While there were repeated alterations to the original plan for the plaza, the museum and a public park opened in 2009.

The Dongdaemun Design Plaza was rescheduled to be completed by the middle of 2013, and then there was the change of power in City Hall in October last year. New liberal Mayor Park Won-soon ordered a full review of the plan, if not the construction itself but the whole range of usage of the facilities. While city officials rack their brains on how to reflect the new mayor’s political vision in the plaza, the dedication date has been moved further back to around March 1, 2014, a date a few months before the next mayoral election.

Out of sheer curiosity as a citizen, I spent some afternoon hours at the Dongdaemun Stadium Memorial and the Dongdaemun History Museum in the park area, which is currently separated from the plaza construction site by a high fence. Zaha Hadid’s aesthetics produced fancy exhibition halls but did not allow much convenience to visitors as the two adjoining facilities each offering only limited display space were not connected underground.

Overlooking the design plaza from the window of a towering shopping center, I pondered the vicissitude of the place. The colonialists tore down old ramparts to build a modern stadium to appease people under occupation, and many decades later when the colonial legacy was demolished in the name of urban development, political ambition interfered. Oh Se-hoon wanted to make the plaza his signature project but the mayor was unable to see its completion because of his failed political gamble.

Leaving the district crowded with Chinese and Japanese tourists and younger Korean consumers, I hoped that the Dongdaemun Design Plaza would generously share a part of its 85,000 square meter space to accommodate the many talented individual designers who, now crammed in the small rooms in Changsin-dong, are setting the trends of Korean fashion and exploring the  global market. 

By Kim Myong-sik

Kim Myong-sik is a former editorial writer of The Korea Herald. ― Ed.