THE NEVER-ENDING CONTROVERSY OVER PRESERVATION AND DEMOLITION: BUPYEONG CAMP MARKET

Various agents, such as the Ministry of National Defense, Incheon Metropolitan City (IMC), Cultural Heritage Administration (CHA), and other civic bodies, are in conflict over whether to demolish the hospital building of the Incheon Arsenal located in the Bupyeong Camp Market (hereinafter BCM), one of the returned US military bases. In a meeting with Lee Yeonkyung (research professor, Incheon National University) who has spent many years researching the returned US military base, SPACE discussed the controversies concerning demolition and what needs to be changed more broadly across the architectural field to resolve such issues.

Bang Yukyung (Bang): Several points of controversy have arisen over whether to demolish the hospital building of Incheon Arsenal in the BCM. Before we begin, what is Incheon Arsenal, and how was it formed?

Lee Yeonkyung (Lee): Incheon Arsenal was the first weapons manufacturing arsenal built in the colony by Japan (as opposed to on the Japanese mainland) and the first to manufacture weapons during the Asian-Pacific War. Its official name is ‘Incheon (Army) Arsenal’ and it was founded in 1941. The site of the Incheon Arsenal was the site of the Bupyeong training field used by the 20th division of the Japanese Army, a site active since the 1920s, and the surrounding area was developed as the Bupyeong district of the Kyeong-In Town Plan since 1939. To invite factories into the Bupyeong area, the Japanese Government-General of Korea and Dongyang Cheoksik Co., Ltd. lent funds at low-interest rates, and several companies with connections to the military industries such as Mitsubishi Steel Manufacturing and Tokyo Steel Manufacturing Co., Ltd. moved into the area. As a result, Bupyeong rapidly developed into a military-industrial city in just five years, from 1939 to 1944. Incheon Arsenal mostly