Spaces I Remember #8 — The House Where Astro Boy Greeted Me
Spaces I Remember #8 — The House Where Astro Boy Greeted Me
The door opened, and before anything else in the house could introduce itself, Astro Boy did. Two figures — one tall, one small — stood arms crossed, looking up at whoever had just walked in. I was genuinely delighted. Before I had taken in a single room, the entrance had already told me what kind of home this was.
This was a unit in Hyundai Hyperion II, one of the residential towers built so that every household along its river-facing line could look out over the Han. It no longer exists — not in the sense of demolition, but in the sense that it now exists only in memory.
At the end of the hallway, above the two Astro Boys, hung a Damien Hirst spot painting — dozens of small circles, each precisely spaced, each a different, unrepeating color. It is, by most measures, a loud work. And yet in this house it never raised its voice. Set against the warmth of the oak flooring and the mischief of Astro Boy beside it, it settled into the space rather than announcing itself.
The owner was someone who loved to travel, and who never seemed to return from a trip empty-handed. A painting here, a small sculpture there, an object picked up somewhere along the way. None of it was arranged for display in the conventional sense — a cabinet, a shelf, a wall. It was folded into the house itself: a corner of a hallway, a wall beside the bed, a shelf in the study. These were not souvenirs so much as sediment — quiet evidence of where he had been.
The back windows of this house faced the ridge where Hannam-dong meets Bogwang-dong — a hillside neighborhood of aging low-rise houses and multi-unit dwellings, not one that would appear in a tourist's frame. By day, it looked exactly as unglamorous as it was: a loose patchwork of rooftops climbing the slope. But at night, as those same houses lit their windows one by one, the hillside transformed. It shimmered — not with the choreographed glow of a skyline, but with hundreds of small, unplanned lights flickering awake at once, like fireflies moving across the dark. It was not spectacle. It was simply people, living, seen from a distance.
That view is being erased as this is written. Demolition in the Hannam District 3 redevelopment zone is already underway. When it is complete, the low rooftops that once caught the evening light will be replaced by apartment towers. For some, this will read as progress. For the person who once watched those lights flicker on, night after night, from this window, I suspect it read differently.
A house where Astro Boy waited at the door. Walls lined with fragments gathered from cities elsewhere. A window that once opened onto a hillside now vanishing beneath new construction. The house itself is gone — but the way of seeing it held, what it chose to call beautiful and worth remembering, remains.
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