Golden Print [EN]: Chapter 216

Twenty-five years old this year.

Lee So-yoon, a fresh graduate from a well-known university, joined Artica Magazine this year. Although she majored in Media and Information Studies, she had always admired architecture and design. Therefore, she joined Artica Magazine, a company where she could somewhat utilize her major while working in a field she loved and admired.

Artica Magazine was a design magazine company with high recognition and one of the highest starting salaries for new employees. The competition for entry was fierce, and So-yoon’s heart leaped when she saw she had been accepted. She had actually done it!

That was until March of this year, her first month at the company.

“Hoo, I thought field work would be nothing but happiness….”

Heavy shadows darkened the skin under her eyes. Each bump of the bus felt like another weight on her tired shoulders as she rode the bus towards Wangsimni, a district in Seoul. In truth, the dream she had held so tightly was already starting to feel heavy.

She had imagined herself surrounded by beauty, inspired by design, but the reality was deadlines, endless emails, and the constant pressure to produce. It took exactly two months for the excitement of interviewing famous designers to fade.

“Let’s see… I should get off here, right?”

Creak!

So-yoon got off the village bus and looked around to find her destination. The building she was going to write about was ‘Wangsimni Parafield.’ It was a new project paid for by a big company called Paramount.

So-yoon was able to find her destination after briefly looking around, which brightened her expression a little. The stylish facade of the Wangsimni station building came into view, located about a 5-minute walk from where she got off the bus.

“Still, it’s nice that today’s site is close to the station.”

So-yoon, walking towards her destination with a slightly lighter step, soon widened her eyes in amazement. She turned the corner, and suddenly, it was there. Parafield Station. It wasn’t just big; it dominated the skyline. The glass and steel shimmered in the sunlight, a breathtaking wave of modern design.

“Wo, wow.”

She had seen pictures of the station under construction, but the actual majesty she witnessed was on a completely different level from what she had imagined. So her pace quickened, and her previously gloomy expression began to lift.

‘How impressive can a subway station be, anyway…?’

So-yoon’s previously listless steps gained a bit more energy. When the Parafield building was somewhat closer, So-yoon began to mechanically press the shutter.

In fact, So-yoon was very happy when she was first assigned to cover Parafield. Bruno was one of So-yoon’s favorite architectural designers. However, that expectation was bound to turn into disappointment, because Bruno’s interview had fallen through.

But her excitement about Parafield had turned sour. The biggest problem? She couldn’t get an interview with Bruno Sanchez, the architect. A beautiful building was useless for her article if she couldn’t talk to the person who designed it.

From the design philosophy behind the building to the design process and procedures, etc. The core content that could be introduced in the magazine could not be arbitrarily fabricated by the interviewer.

So, could she reduce the amount or cancel the coverage plan? Of course, that was not an option either. Because of Bruno’s name value and the hot topic of the Parafield building, this content could not be handled carelessly.

Artica Magazine needed to publish the article when Parafield opened, which would help sell more magazines because everyone is talking about it.

‘I’m going to have to write a novel all day again today.’

If she just took pretty pictures and wrote simple captions, like a personal blog, she would be called into the editor-in-chief’s office and scolded for at least an hour.

[So-yoon! Is this Artica Magazine or your personal diary?]

[Honestly, you wouldn’t have gotten away with this kind of work even in college! Where’s the effort? Where’s the heart?]

So-yoon shook her head, the editor-in-chief’s face flashing in her mind – red-faced and furious, just like the last time she had submitted a rushed article. She sighed deeply, as if she could already hear the editor-in-chief’s sharp voice ringing in her ears. The small spark of excitement she felt when she saw the station quickly died out, replaced by the familiar weight of her work worries.

“Ugh, it’ll work out somehow.”

So-yoon, pressing the camera shutter and entering the inside of Parafield, looked around here and there, wondering if there was any special content worth covering. The only fortunate thing was that she could look around the inside of the building to some extent, even though it had not yet been completed.

Parafield was Wangsimni Station before it was a complex mall. Therefore, for the sake of the citizens using Wangsimni Station, the completed sections were opened as much as possible.

‘Shall I go over there once…?’

So-yoon, putting the camera back into her shoulder bag, moved towards the passageway connected to the basement. She walked deeper into the station, the usual station sounds fading away. Then, a new sound reached her ears – a low, rhythmic whirring, followed by a heavy thud. Curiosity piqued, she followed the sound…

“Huh…?”

So-yoon, following the sound, widened her eyes even more than when she first arrived at Parafield.

‘What on earth is that?’

A spacious courtyard hollowed out in the center of the modern shopping center, and a huge structure being installed in the spacious lobby on the lowest floor. Then she saw it. Rising from the floor like a frozen fountain of light, was the pavilion. Sunlight streamed from the glass roof above, catching on its thousands of diamond-shaped panels, making it sparkle like a thousand tiny stars had been captured and held in place.

‘Da, jackpot! It doesn’t seem like a simple sculpture…?’

So-yoon, with an expression as if she had met a savior, hurriedly moved towards the lobby.

Tap- Tap!

As soon as she arrived at the lobby railing, she immediately took out her camera and began to press the shutter. She wanted to go down closer, but access to the lowest floor was still restricted.

‘This must be the work of a famous architect or installation artist. Who is it? If I can find out who that person is, I’ll have more to write about….’

So-yoon thought that this structure must be the work of a great designer who was friends with Bruno. Judging by the fact that the crane was still moving, it was not 100 percent installed, but even in its unfinished state, it was showing off a beautiful figure that took the viewer’s breath away.

As if it knew all the angles at which light would fall and be refracted. Hundreds and thousands of large and small diamond panels gradually lined up along the flow of that pure white light.

So-yoon, captivated by the beautiful spectacle of light, began to capture it delicately with her camera, as if not to miss a single flow. She wasn’t specifically thinking about which pictures to put in the magazine or how. For the first time since she started this job, So-yoon was focusing solely on the work and pressing the shutter.

With only the thought of capturing this fantastic space as beautifully as possible with her camera. So, taking a spot on the railing, So-yoon focused on shooting for almost ten minutes. She couldn’t go down to the lowest floor where the pavilion was built, but thanks to the high-performance camera, she was able to zoom in and shoot as if she were seeing it right in front of her eyes.

So-yoon, who had always enjoyed taking pictures of amazing spaces and design works with her camera, had quite a decent shooting skill for someone who was not a professional photographer.

‘This is really amazing……. How on earth did they make this?’

So-yoon, completely immersed in this beautiful space itself, forgetting about the burden of coverage for the moment. But a moment later, So-yoon’s immersion was suddenly broken.

While turning the camera around to shoot, the face of a young man appeared on the zoomed-in lens.

“H-huh?!”

At first, she thought it was just one of the workers installing this structure and passed it by. But the next moment, she couldn’t help but bring the camera back to the man’s face.

‘Wait. Who is this guy? I’ve seen that face somewhere before…?’

With the camera lens fixed on the man’s face, So-yoon paused for a moment to think. Then, when she made eye contact with the man, So-yoon couldn’t help but jump up from her seat.

“Jackpot! I struck gold!!”

The man’s identity was none other than ‘Seo Woo-jin,’ one of the hottest figures in the Korean architectural design industry these days.

Regardless of the field of design, it naturally starts with brainstorming ideas. The brainstormed inspiration soon leads to idea sketches. When that sketch is materialized, it leads to a physical object.

In architectural design, the first physical objects were blueprints and perspective drawings. In that respect, Woo-jin had already seen the physical object of the pavilion he designed a long time ago.

Woo-jin could fully see the completed pavilion with just the elaborate perspective drawings made with 3D modeling and the miniature model made by Seok-hyun based on it. And the pavilion, completely constructed on the actual site, was almost identical to what Woo-jin had seen in the perspective drawings.

The patterns and modules that gradually changed according to the flow of light, which Woo-jin had designed in a virtual three-dimensional space, were perfectly realized as Woo-jin had first imagined.

However, there was one thing that he could not confirm in advance with a mock-up or perspective drawing, and that was the flow of ‘light,’ which was the source of this pavilion’s form.

Of course, he could try to reproduce the reflection or refraction of light to some extent through 3D rendering, but it could never be perfectly identical to the actual light.

So, before starting the installation of the pavilion, the part that Woo-jin was most anxious about was that: whether the flow of light pouring out from the space designed by Bruno could harmonize with the pavilion as Woo-jin had imagined.

But as a result, Woo-jin’s worries were unfounded. The moment he hung the last part of the pre-made pavilion on the wire and inserted it.

Whirr- Click!

As if the last piece of a giant puzzle of thousands of pieces had been put together, the pure white ray of light that came down through the glass ceiling began to spread subtly around the pavilion.

It was like a mysterious mist rising after the rain. Woo-jin’s pavilion, which emitted it, was like a beautiful jewel crafted into thousands of pieces.

It was completely the same as the imagined and created image, but it was also a perfect image that he had never seen before. The true beauty of the pavilion designed by Woo-jin could only be seen after inserting the last puzzle piece called ‘light.’

“Wow…….”

A low exclamation leaked out from Seok-hyun’s mouth as he admired the figure after all the work was done. Seok-hyun didn’t know much about formative beauty. Apart from that, he was definitely feeling that this pavilion was beautiful.

Woo-jin was also standing quietly next to Seok-hyun, staring at the completed pavilion, and a proud smile was on his face. In exactly two weeks, this pavilion would be revealed to the world.

Wangsimni Parafield, which is in the midst of finishing work, was scheduled to open to the public in the last week of May. Woo-jin was starting to look forward to that day very much.