Lego Buildings & Construction

Construction in this country occurs at an alarming rate. I've been here for only a few weeks and already I have seen dozens of countruction sites all over place using equipment I have never seen anywhere else.

When I first came here I learned that the Koreans have hundreds of gorgeous mountains everywhere throughout the country that are not allowed to be built on. I believed this to be for conservation reasons and the idea that Koreans want to keep the things that make this country beautiful around. That they were continuing to build these gigantic sprawling metropolises around the mountains to preserve something unique.

Well that couldn't be further from the truth. What they do is use these mountains as natural resources. They will bulldoze a mountain to make granite, sand, and rock to be used for their construction materials. The exact opposite of the conservation efforts I had envisioned and respected.

Oh well.

What is kind of crazy is what they build. The city I live in, Suji, is roughly 8 years old, has 200,000 people, is nearly impossible to find on any map due to its newness, and almost completely made up of apartment buildings. The Koreans will build apartment building clusters and the only way to tell them apart is by the rather large numbers they put on each building:


^Random Apartment City

These clusters are built very quickly because they are built the exact same way, at the exact same time, using some of the cheapest materials around. The idea behind it is basically they don't need to pay some design company to make something modern and trendy, and if you can make one of something that someone will buy, why not make 5 more just like it?

However from a distance they can be quite pretty in a way because this just isn't something you see at home:


Suji is a suburb of Seoul but supposedly within the next 10 years or so it is expected to be another rather large city directly next to Seoul, a la Incheon. Maybe these apartment buildings are just the start of getting ready for the city that will grow up around them.