Resumen de Building an architecture of everyday life in South Korea: mass housing estates in Seoul as an instrument of modernization, 1962-2008
The mass housing estates – apat’u tanji in Korean – that were developed in Seoul during the second half of the twentieth century are the most characteristic spatial practice of the South Korean modernization project. They are not just a passive outcome of economic and urbanization processes, but an active political means of introducing new economic and social structures within the modernizing project of the developmental regime, with a radical impact on the transformation of the city and society. Thus, they function at two interrelated levels: as the building blocks of a modern project of city-making in physical terms (an urbanizing mechanism), and as a means of constructing a modern urban society and way of life (a socializing mechanism).
Mass housing estates have been instrumental in shaping all the settings of everyday life, from the urban scale to residential neighborhoods and domestic habitats.
Although an estimated 53% of the population of Seoul lives in mass housing estates, they are not considered a disciplinary subject. They are largely disregarded as banal by the architectural community and often criticized from a sociological, economic or policy perspective. This research questions that assumed banality and inquiries into the spatial and organizational logics behind the apparent normality of these estates.
The thesis approaches them as an architectural topic and proposes a methodology to identify, describe, interpret and criticize them from a disciplinary stance at different scales: the scale of the city, the scale of the housing estate and the scale of the building type or residential unit. These three scales determine the basic structure of the research.
The findings demonstrate that the implementation of mass housing in Seoul has not been a homogeneous process. Instead, it has followed different rationales over the study period. The housing problem was understood at urban scale simply as the quantitative provision of housing units. The complexes did not contribute to the formation and organization of urban space and remained as isolated fragments that are partially coordinated with other processes of urban growth, the existing city and the natural context. Nevertheless, the systematization of planning processes and formal models for the provision of housing units at a massive scale were consolidated into a technology that normalized the construction of entire urban fragments.
At the scale of the housing estate, relevant innovations were produced for a brief period with the introduction of site planning strategies based on residential clusters. The development of a standardized unit type also yielded an innovative modern layout which hybridizes global housing models with local understanding of domesticity, privacy, posture and comfort.
The thesis evidences how, ultimately, the shift to private development at the end of the 1980s prevented further development of the mass housing model. Today, apat’u tanji have become spatial organizational protocols that standardize the built environment at different scales. Site planning strategies and unit types developed earlier under the patronage of the public housing authority were captured by the market and pressed into service without their original community-building agendas or theoretical bases.
