SPACE September 2025 (No. 694)
©ISON Architects
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.
When we first visited the site in Yeonghwa-dong (now Guyeong-gil) with the client in 2019, there were eight fortune-telling parlours in the vicinity. This street – once a boisterous playground for hard-drinking U.S. servicemen – had been drained of any trace of human warmth. If there is a scent that hangs in the air just before death, I thought, it must be something like this. At the far end of three decades of urban hollowing out, the physical dissolution of the buildings could be felt as plainly as the cold.
The client had been running a successful Italian restaurant for more than a decade on a lakeshore about ten minutes away by car. Now, he sought to fulfill a long-held dream: opening a jazz club in the old city centre. The building he had marked out stood at the corner of an intersection in the very heart of the historic grid. The shell of an old U.S. military club still remained, though its signage had been replaced with the words, ‘Yeoncheonbong Sanshindongja’ (fortune teller’s name). His wish to open a jazz club here went beyond personal ambition—it was powered by a deliberate resolve to draw people back into a place in decline. There was a sense of duty towards his hometown, yet without the confidence built over a decade of cultivating local networks, such an idea might never have taken root. He gathered friends who shared his vision, and together six members from various regions formed a corporation to lead the project...
