Visiting Korea

In the mid-1980s, when Korean Air began direct flights to Korea on the Boeing 747, I went back to my homeland for the first time in nearly twenty years since leaving it. Friends who had passed Hyundai Engineering & Construction's hiring exam when we graduated from university had already been promoted to managing director or senior managing director at Hyundai E&C and were playing important roles in Korea's domestic construction industry and in international construction in the Middle East. Friends who had started design firms were busy, beginning with the apartment complexes shooting up like bamboo shoots after the rain, and taking on the design of important buildings throughout Korea. My friends, learning that it had already been nearly twenty years since I took up golf, took me to the Anyang golf course.

The Anyang golf course (now Anyang Benest GC), founded by Chairman Lee Byung-chul, was Korea's first golf course owned by a private company, and there was a historic story attached to it. Not long after it opened in 1967, Chairman Lee was playing golf with acquaintances. That day, receiving word that someone had come to see him, he stopped his game and hurried to the clubhouse. It was President Park Chung-hee who had come. It was the first time Chairman Lee and President Park played a round together; they played nine holes and then went on to dinner. It is said that from then on President Park often came to the Anyang course and the two shared a friendship.

The Gwanak Campus of Seoul National University

When I first visited Seoul National University's Gwanak campus, I heard that it had originally been the Gwanak Country Club, the "Beodeul-gol" [Willow Valley] golf course owned by Samsung. On the balcony of the old clubhouse, then being used as the faculty center, there was still the chair where Chairman Lee Byung-chul often sat, looking down over the course and enjoying his own thoughts. I too sat in that chair and tried to feel Chairman Lee's warmth. It made me think that he, together with Park Chung-hee and Chung Ju-yung, was one of the great men who changed the history of Korea. It is said that around October 27, 1987, a few days before he passed away, Chairman Lee wanted to ride a golf cart and play one last round. After I returned home, I heard the story that even after it grew dark, for his sake, since he wanted to keep playing, the staff mobilized every vehicle used on the course and, with their lights on, he played the last round of his life. Chairman Lee Byung-chul is the father of Korean electronics technology, who raised his son Lee Kun-hee to overtake Japan's Sony, and he is also the founder of the Korean golf movement that made possible the birth of Park In-bee, who has recently been holding the vanguard of women's golf in the world.

There is a record that the name Gwanak comes from the time when, in the 17th year of King Munmu of Silla (677), the Great Master Uisang (義湘大師) came to Gwanaksan, built the Uisangdae pavilion on the cliff of Yeonjubong Peak for his practice, built a temple in the valley, and named it Gwanaksa. Since ancient times, together with Songaksan (松岳山) in Gaeseong, Hwaaksan (華岳山) in Gapyeong, Gamaksan (紺岳山) in Paju, and Unaksan (雲岳山) in Pocheon, it has been counted as one of the Five Great Mountains of Gyeonggi (京畿五岳), a famous mountain with outstanding peaks and rocks. Because its peaks are shaped like flames, its configuration (形勢) in feng shui is that of the Fire Star (火星), and it was regarded as a mountain of fire energy (火氣), called "the fire mountain south of the royal capital (王都南方之火山)" in relation to Gyeongbokgung Palace. I have heard that the reason the name plaque of Sungnyemun Gate — where I worked in the early 1960s and again from 2010 until this year — is written vertically rather than horizontally is also explained in feng shui as a means to quell Gwanaksan's fire energy.

Seoul National University was a federated university created right after liberation, in 1946, when the U.S. Military Government announced the "Plan for the Establishment of Seoul National University" and bound ten independent colleges into one. It combined ten colleges in all, centered on Keijo Imperial University, the only comprehensive university in Korea before liberation. Destroyed in the war, Seoul National University was rebuilt in 1954 under the military government through a U.S. aid program called the "Minnesota Project."

It is said that in the winter of 1969, President Park Chung-hee, accompanied by Hong Jong-chul, then Minister of Education, and Choi Moon-hwan, president of Seoul National University, visited the Gwanak golf course, which he had had his eye on early on. In 1971 President Park's stated purpose was "to provide a hall for the pursuit of truth, on a hill overlooking the Han River, for our beloved sons and daughters who will inherit our cultural heritage," but for a long time there was an unofficial supposition that the Park government's aim was to remove Seoul National University students' pro-democracy demonstrations from within the four great gates of the city. The students resisted strongly, throwing Molotov cocktails, and it is said that the Gwanak campus was born when, simultaneously with its establishment in the spring of 1975, the world's largest police box, commanding a battalion of combat police, was set up at the main gate. The master plan for the Gwanak campus was completed in 1971, and the groundbreaking was also hurried through that same year. After that, the first phase of relocation took place in 1974, and it was said the College of Engineering moved in the fourth phase in 1979–1980. Except for the SNU College of Medicine, everything was gathered below Gwanaksan in the Bongcheon-dong and Sillim-dong area of Gwanak-gu. To my eyes, returning after twenty years, the changes in my homeland showed a country struggling for growth and development as it passed through a turbulent era of escaping poverty and backwardness, as if its young blood were boiling.

Ohio, Where I Lived

At that time I was living in Ohio. Ohio is where, having come to Minnesota in America to study at the age of 28, I set up my own household from my mid-thirties and started my own business from my mid-forties. It is the home state that produced five U.S. presidents, and even now, in presidential election season, Ohio's decision shows a tremendous influence on the election across all of America. It is the most conservative region of American society, geographically located in the center of America, without the European leanings of the East or the Asian and Mexican influences of the West. To the north is Michigan with the city of Detroit, and to the northwest is Illinois with the city of Chicago. While I ran my own architectural firm, from starting my business in 1979 until retiring in 2005, I came to learn about the great people from here who changed American history. The city of Dayton is close to Columbus, where the state capitol is, and close to Cincinnati as well, so the three cities cluster together in southwestern Ohio.

In 1865 the Civil War of American history ended, and it was a time when the country had just stabilized and recovered from economic hardship and the immigrant population was growing. Trains had begun running on steam engines, and it was around the time when people in Europe were trying to build automobiles with steam or electric engines.

Dayton, Ohio

Wilbur and Orville Wright, brothers from Dayton, the city where our family lives, were born in the 1860s, and from the early 1870s they ran a bicycle shop on a busy street here and made a hobby of building and flying toy airplanes. In Detroit, about 200 miles to the north, automobile production had not yet begun.

The brothers began to dream of flying through the air by turning a propeller. By day they repaired bicycles in their shop, and in the evenings they devoted themselves to their hobby of building model airplanes and flying them over the fields. They installed motors that turned propellers on model airplanes made of wood and paper, and little by little they began to fly.

Humanity's First Flight

On December 17, 1903, they flew for the first time carrying a person under engine power. The fact that on a sandy beach on the North Carolina coast they first flew 650 feet in one minute and landed became known to the world in 1905. This was the very beginning of humanity's flight through the sky. Around this time automobile production began in Detroit, and with supplies for the First World War in 1914, the production of automobiles and airplanes got fully on track. This is also why Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the second largest in America, and the Air Force Museum came to be in the city of Dayton.

Among the world-famous products invented in Dayton is the NCR (National Cash Register) machine. I remember that when we were young, when you bought something at a store and paid, the shopkeeper gave you your change from a machine that made a loud noise. That machine was the world's earliest and most widely used cash register. It is said that John Patterson built a factory for these registers in 1884 and, running a worldwide business, some 20,000 employees produced hundreds of registers a day. During the Second World War, commissioned by the U.S. Navy, they broke the military communication codes of Germany and Japan.

During the Second World War, knowing in advance the codes for German troop movements, they annihilated the enemy. Detecting in advance, within the codes, the flight information of Japanese Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, they shot down his plane just before it arrived in the Philippines and assassinated him — such things became turning points in achieving victory in the Second World War. NCR's chief of codebreaking, Joseph Desch, regretting that so many German and Japanese soldiers had lost their lives through his codebreaking, disappeared on his own. Later, after the U.S. government promised him that his work would go only to peaceful efforts, he came back and devoted himself to the invention of the computer. While living right here in the city of Dayton, I learned that NCR's calculating technology carried on into IBM computers and led to the worldwide IT revolution.