The heritage conservator recommended bricking up the existing, random openings – as if they had never been there – and cleaning all the soot-blackened brickwork. But even then, we knew that was not the path we wanted to take. First of all, those ‘holes’ held enormous potential; I felt it immediately. And second, we had no intention of covering up Ostrava’s complex, ambiguous history. We wanted to add our own, contemporary layer to this story.

The entire process – from production to consumption – became ever more deeply subsumed under the logic of the ‘economy of scale’, and today economic activities take place within a complex distribution structure dominated by corporations and capital. This shift in the large cities spread across the entire country. As a result, most consumption now occurs through standardised distribution channels such as large supermarkets, convenience stores, and online platforms, regardless of local context. This change carries significant social implications—not only in the homogenising effect of product offerings but also in the loss of local distinctiveness, and more fundamentally, in the ‘standardisation of lifestyles’.

Newly built in Seongsu-dong, the flagship store for the perfume brand Pointtwofive.Second (025S) unveils the distinctive essence of the perfumes through its architectural language. Drawing inspiration from the perfume’s alluring description, ‘a subtle balance between fragrant / beautiful and foul / ugly’, the store has been designed to achieve harmony through dramatic contrasts. Just as this meticulously calibrated perfume reveals its character through the interplay of strange, sharp scents and smooth, sweet notes, this space also possesses a unique atmosphere in the clash of opposing materials and sensations.

I had been living in Iksan since 2018, until in 2021 a cultural foundation in Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province, offered me a private writing studio. They even remodeled it for me. The place was surrounded by mountains, with a river in view, and the scenery was truly splendid. I suppose they thought a writer would produce better work in such surroundings, but it turned out I was completely alone in the middle of a forest. Living high up in the mountains came with its inconveniences. After spending two winters there, I began to think it might be time to move on. In the end, some younger colleagues said, ‘How about coming over here to be with us?’and that’s how I ended up in Gunsan.

Gunsan opened its port in 1899. It was one of four cities – along with Incheon, Mokpo, and Busan – that had been designated for foreign trade under the 1876 Treaty of Ganghwa with Japan. Throughout the Japanese colonial period, it served as an extraction outpost, syphoning rice from the Honam Plain to the Japanese mainland, and stood among the nation’s most prosperous cities. The urban plan followed a grid of roughly 70 × 100m, a framework that remains intact to this day. Since the 1990s, as housing shifted towards apartment complexes and towers, development pushed outward to the city’s edges, creating its current expanded form. Like many mid-sized cities found across Korea, Gunsan was not spared the hollowing out of its historic centre.