Architecture 101

For those of us living in the diaspora, the concept of "home" is inherently fragmented. It is a physical space we inhabit in the present—a snowy street in Toronto or a quiet suburb in Vancouver—but it is also an emotional blueprint of a place we left behind. Building a life as an immigrant often feels like attempting to reconstruct an elusive memory. Where do we belong when our hearts are anchored in two different times and geographies?

Lee Yong-ju’s 2012 film Architecture 101 captures this exact wistfulness, though its geography is purely temporal. Beautifully equating the process of building a house with the memory of a 1990s college first love, the film serves as a deeply nostalgic essay for anyone drifting between the memories of yesterday and today.

The premise is elegantly simple: Seung-min, an architect stuck in the mundane grind of his mid-thirties, is unexpectedly visited by Seo-yeon, his first love from university. She commissions him to rebuild her childhood home on Jeju Island. As the physical walls of the house go up, the emotional walls between their past and present come down, taking us back to their freshman year in 1996.

For international viewers, the 1990s depicted in the film might require a bit of cultural translation. In South Korea, the mid-90s was a period of newfound democratic freedom and economic boom, often romanticized as a golden era of youth culture. The film is steeped in these period details—from the chunky portable CD players sharing the acoustic ballad "Etude of Memory" by the duo Exhibition, to the frantic checking of pagers, affectionately called bbi-bbi (삐삐) in Korean. The title itself refers to a popular elective course where freshmen were tasked with wandering Seoul, photographing their neighborhoods. It was a time of analog romance, where waiting for a missed connection at a bus stop was an act of profound devotion.

As a Korean-Canadian, watching Architecture 101 evokes a unique kind of ache. The way Seung-min and Seo-yeon look back at their younger selves—with a mix of deep affection and lingering regret—mirrors the immigrant’s gaze toward the motherland. We, too, are constantly navigating the space between the people we were before we crossed the ocean and the people we had to become to survive here.

Building a house requires a solid foundation, an understanding of the environment, and an acceptance that the finished structure will eventually weather and age. Through Seo-yeon's Jeju home, the film suggests that we cannot live in the past, nor can we undo our youthful mistakes. But we can build a present that honors those memories. It reminds us that whether we are constructing a house by the Korean sea or forging a new hybrid identity in Canada, the spaces we build are ultimately containers for our memories. Because they safely shelter the fragments of our past, we are able to bravely face the future.