Architecture 101 2012

Seoul, the present day frames a quiet, bittersweet drama about memory, choice, and the spaces we inhabit. Architect Lee Seung-min is approached by Yang Seo-yeon, played by Han Ga-in, to design a new house on the site of her 30-year-old family home on Jeju island. He agrees reluctantly but cannot conjure a design that truly pleases her, so they decide to renovate and expand the existing house. The project pulls them into long days and evenings together in Jeju, much to the growing annoyance of his fiancée, Go Joon-hee, who is preparing to marry him and move to the United States. Tension, longing, and the pull of the past begin to thread through their days as the present grows crowded with memory and possibility.

As Seo-yeon tends to her dying father Lee Seung-ho, Seung-min starts to understand more about what happened to Seo-yeon in the years between then and now, and he recalls the moment they first met in college in the early 1990s. In those days, Bae Suzy played Seo-yeon, and the two lived in the same neighborhood, Jeongneung-dong, Seoul, while attending the same architecture class. He remembers how she seemed drawn to the wealthy student Jae-wook, Yoo Yeon-seok, and how their mutual friend Nab Deuk-yi, Cho Jung-seok, tried to coach him on how to win girls. Hoping to confess his feelings at the perfect moment, Seung-min asks Seo-yeon to meet him at the abandoned house they frequented, on the first day that it snows that winter.

But one night he catches Jae-wook and a drunken Seo-yeon entering her home. When the first snowfall finally arrives, Seo-yeon waits in the abandoned house alone, leaving behind her portable CD player with a CD from her favorite artist. In the present, Seo-yeon receives that very same CD player and CD, a sign that Seung-min later visited the site and remembered their shared promise. Yet, despite the tender cue from the past, Seung-min ultimately chooses his fiancée and flies to America with her, while Seo-yeon sits in the house he built for her, listening to the CD.