Working for SPACE

 

New Museum in New York by SANAA was the first hurdle in my two-year race of assistance for one editorial team of a major Korean architectural medium. To my untrained eye, this seemed to be just several white angular twisted boxes interlocking up and down along the height - but oddly enough it seemed to be entertaining both its client and on-lookers. SANAA received a Pritzker prize later, so my latter observation turned out to be something upcoming and universal.

 

Other items I have worked from the beginning on at this magazine were often related to their special features involving issues such as Asian megacities. Excepting Seoul, I translated some material for them - concerning Kuala Lumpur, Beijing, Bangkok, Singapore, Dubai etc. Month by month, the editors one by one went on a trip to their megacity, meeting local experts on the home ground of each megacity, interviewing them and sometimes asking them afterwards to write for us. At the very beginning of my career here I roughly translated  for one editor a preparatory article on urban Dubai from English to Korean. This went off well, and the corresponding editor and I were soon in a lasting friendly co-working relationship.

 

Something as important for me with which I assisted the editors was the liaison of contact with architectural photographers and foreign architects. For domestic projects we had as resident photographer a very able and thoughtful celebrity photographer, Kim Yongkwan. However we had to look for photographers for the coverage of overseas projects. We found Iwan Baan - who is still working broadly in architectural photographs - and as we looked, some more architectural photographers emerged. Also we emailed a lot of foreign architects, for the first or nth time, and as I wasn’t certain I could handle the writing of the email on my own, I politely requested the editors to provide me with templates for translations of the model emails from Korean to English. This worked. And I started telephoning architects and their representatives in European and American countries starting at 16:00 Korean time, to inquire them to check if our email got in through the mailbox and if they had received it, please do something about it. This made things go faster in the deadlines of the editorial team.

 

 I created a gmail address, just to work with foreign architects and photographers. I charged the editorial team with this e-mail account when I quit the magazine, to help parting easier and comfortable.

 

Before my departure from the magazine the editorial team was peppered with lots of fond assistance on my side and timely calling on the phone of people who would never have spoken to me in their lives, I being a linguistics major and never having been experienced in architecture, until I was let into this editorial team. During my tenure, I stared at many a brilliant architectural photograph, hastily translated captions, looked over other translations, generally feeling very happy that I was in this beautiful thing together with specialists. (One new, capable editor corrected my Konglish-ish “spirit of the times” with “zeitgeist”. )