Sticks and Stones

East Asian architecture is beautiful. Pagodas, stupas, and temples litter the Pacific Rim; each bringing art to an otherwise fully pragmatic form: the building. The planet is covered in a mass of buildings so dull no one considers them significant. They are mundane and purely functional. A roof, four walls, a window or two and a door. There is nothing exceptional or even noticeable about the vast majority of buildings.

So we revere the beautiful ones. The inspirational ones. The ones that demonstrate some artistic thought in their conception. We flock in our billions to these buildings because they are shrines to imagination. They are the realisation of someone’s dream. It is also necessary that our buildings are aesthetically pleasing. We need them to be because we are surrounded by them; encompassed entirely by them.

We celebrate our finest accomplishments in buildings and mourn great losses in them. We dream, we hope, and we pray in these beautiful buildings.

Today one of them burned down. Cinders spewed across Seoul as Namdaemun was engulfed in flames so riotous and menacing that they could not be stopped. When day broke this morning, what was left was a morbid corpse, a reminder of what once stood atop that stone pedestal. The Cultural Heritage Administration said it would take at least three years to fully restore the gate and it would cost some $21 million. It will be rebuilt because buildings like these must be rebuilt.

The quotation that best characterises peoples’ response to this disaster was from President-elect Lee Myung-bak. “People’s hearts will ache.”