Seoul is an awkward city, a city that however hard people try to homogenize and harmonize to an accepted urban model, always manages to slip away and revert back to its original state. This unashamed authenticity is what I so admire about Seoul, a city that constantly has to adapt.

To be fair, it was not love at first sight. Its scale, fabric and shear brutality can be overwhelming for the first time visitor. Seoul does not try to gently seduce you with graceful boulevards and imposing icons, like Paris; no Seoul is a 21st Century metropolis squeezed into 15th Century Capitol, with the all the overflow one would expect, a city welcomes you with a thunder bolt.

My love affair with Seoul started when I began reading Seoul as a series of short episodes rather than a comprehensive book that had to read from cover to back. Drifting through streets I started assembling these moments, researching and imagining what lay behind the scenes, eventually discovering a city of narratives. The Yogurt Army is a testament to these narratives an example that exemplifies my point.

Scattered around the streets of Seoul; at corners, junctions, outside subway stations, inside housing estates, wandering through the interstices of the city you can find the Yogurt Army. Their troops, more specifically middle aged female armed soldiers, maneuver through the urban jungle like a colony of ants, in a consorted effort to better the general health of the city’s inhabitants.

The ambulant merchant (yogurt soldier) is dressed in strict beige and brown uniform, fitted with all necessary urban accessories: hat, gloves, visor, trainers and scarf. Their combat vehicles come in various forms, manual or electrically operated, with built-in refrigerated containers. Patrols are carefully orchestrated from central HQ and can either be a solo reconnaissance or two people expeditions, where every delivery is carefully planned.

Eccentric encounters are part of Seoul’s constellation, a city is more than an assimilation of buildings and voids. These experiences allow us to read and understand the praxis of the city via absorption, not consciously experience; we perceive these encounters as a form of urban diffusion. Yogurts don’t simply lower ones cholesterol they filter people’s actions into civic reality.

Why do I tell you this? Whenever I talk to architects, professors and students about Seoul, unanimously they feel embarrassed, they subconsciously want Seoul to be more ordered, less chaotic, more like other cities they stress… in other words they want Seoul to be molded by the scalpel of the conventional, and one could even add western, parameters. I don’t agree: Seoul should be proud of its authenticity and retain its originality by constantly dealing with its visible and invisible past.

Written by Peter Winston Ferretto, SNU Professor of Architecture, ferretto@snu.ac.kr