Читать книгу Hanok: The Korean House - Nani Park - Страница 7

Introduction

Awalk through Seoul brings to mind bibimbap, the colorful mixed rice and vegetable dish that has come to represent Korean food in the minds of many. Like bibimbap, Seoul has distinct forms of architecture that mix to create the electric unified whole that defies easy description. To many, this “mixed Seoul” appears light gray at first glance, but it soon turns that image on its head as bold colors and unique designs catch the eye upon closer examination.

The “mixed Seoul” of today, of course, is a new city, a product of nearly a half century of rapid economic growth since industrialization began in the early 1960s. Before the boom, Seoul looked more uniform as traditional architectural ideas and practices created a more orderly cityscape. Seoul was founded in 1394 as the capital of the Joseon Dynasty that ruled Korea until 1910. From its founding to the end of the nineteenth century, Seoul was an ocean of tile and thatched roofs with official buildings popping up like islands. All buildings in Seoul were built of wood and used natural materials, such as stone and paper. Like many Asian cities, a wall surrounded the city and only residents were allowed on the inside after dark. Four large gates and four smaller gates in the wall controlled the flow of people and goods into the city.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, foreign powers, both Western and Asian, began to fight for hegemony over Korea. Japan eventually won the day and subjected Korea to colonial rule from 1910 to 1945. During the late nineteenth century, foreign missionaries, diplomats and traders brought Western architectural styles to Korea and brick churches and multi-floor box-like buildings began to pierce the traditional cityscape. The streetscape changed, too, as roads were widened and paved to make way for streetcars.

The Japanese colonial period brought rapid change to Seoul as Japan sought to integrate Korea deeply into the Japanese economy. As part of that effort, Japan turned Seoul, which it had renamed as Keijo, into a regional administrative city that was subservient to central power in Tokyo. Japan built imposing public buildings, some of which remain today, to house modern Japanese institutions: schools, hospitals, post offices and police stations. Many of these buildings were built on sites that once held detached palaces and other official buildings. Architecture related to Korean cultural heritage, meanwhile, was recast to represent Korean culture as “local culture” within greater Japan. Many of the buildings in Gyeongbokgung Palace, for example, were demolished (most of the wood, stones and roof tiles were reused) and the headquarters of the colonial government was built on the grounds in 1926, leaving the remaining palace buildings as touches of local color for tourists.

The later years of Japanese colonial rule brought industrialization and a surge in the population of Seoul. Japan’s seizure of Manchuria in 1931 and invasion of China proper in 1937 turned Korea into an important base for military operations. Seoul became a magnate for people from other regions of Korea and from Japan proper. The city expanded beyond the wall, and parts of which were destroyed to make way for roads and buildings. The housing shortage of the 1920s became acute in the 1930s, forcing the colonial government to encourage the construction of new housing. Large plots of “developable land” inside the wall were divided into small plots to allow for greater density and new areas of tract housing outside the wall were developed.

The housing boom in the 1930s stimulated the development of new forms of residential architecture. One of the most experimental forms was the “city hanok” that emerged in the late 1920s and 1930s. The word hanok is used to refer to traditional Korean houses of various sizes. Han means “Korea” and ok means “house.” As a genre of residential architecture, the hanok is most noted for its use of heated floors, known as ondol, which originated thousands of years ago in the Korean Peninsula for heating in the cold winter. The ondol heating system used timber to heat a fire in a stove next to the house. Heat from the fire spread under the floor, heating the stones in the process. Smoke escaped through a chimney, and the stones of the floor were covered with oiled paper to prevent any smoke from coming into the room. The same fire was also used for cooking. Because timber was limited, heated rooms were small and had small windows. Hanok also had unheated rooms with wood floors. These rooms were larger, had more windows and were used mainly in the warmer seasons.

Over thousands of years, the hanok has adapted well to the Korean climate and the practical needs of residents. The mixture of heated and unheated rooms saves energy and helps make the house comfortable throughout the year. Below the tiles on the roof is a layer of dirt that helps insulate the house in the winter and cool it in the summer. The eaves of the roof are short enough to allow sunlight to enter the house in the winter but long enough to keep it away during the summer. The eaves also help keep rain from hitting the house, which protects the wood. The posts sit on stone bases, which prevent them from rotting. The paper windows breathe and allow light into the house but keep out wind and help retain heat in the winter.

Like other types of vernacular architecture, hanok were built by master carpenters who designed the house on site, often as it was being built. The process of building a hanok starts with preparing the stone bases and the foundation for the heated floor. The frame of wooden posts and beams goes up next, followed by the roof. After the frame and roof are up, the walls of clay and rice straw are built and the floors are put in. The final stage of construction consists of attaching the windows and papering the heated floors, walls and windows. Traditionally, hanok were built of the following four elements: wood, stone, clay (including roof tiles) and paper. A small amount of iron was used for hinges and locks.

Spending time in a hanok allows you to observe its many practical and artistic details. Designs at the end of roof tiles, for example, use a wide range of playful motifs based on symbolically important flowers, mythological creatures and Chinese characters.

The size and structure of a hanok varied with social class. Aristocrats lived in estates that consisted of several elegant structures with tile roofs. The men’s quarters, or sarangchae, was where the senior man of the house lived, studied and entertained guests. It combined elegance with minimalist aesthetics. The women’s quarters, or anchae, was larger and was where women lived and raised children. The kitchen was attached to this part of the house. The two parts of the house were close to each other but were separated by a wall. Estates also had a number of servants who lived in the servants’ quarters, or hengnangchae, located near to the other two buildings. Behind the kitchen was an area for storing kimchi and other condiments. Many estates also had a small ancestral shrine, or sadang, that was used in annual ceremonies in honor of ancestors. Peasant houses, by contrast, were usually a simple structure with a few rooms and a thatched roof. In Seoul and several other provincial centers, lower-ranking bureaucrats and merchants lived in smaller houses with tile roofs.

Built on small lots that were divided from larger lots, city hanok applied traditional hanok building principles to the new urban environment of limited space. Built of wood, city hanok had curving tile roofs typical of the larger houses in Seoul up to the end of the nineteenth century. They used many of the same materials, for example stone for heated floors and paper to cover the floors and walls. The kitchen was reduced in size but was still lower than the rest of the house so that heat from cooking fires could flow under the floor of neighboring rooms in winter. Though criticized for crowding too many people into a small space, the city hanok proved popular and spread quickly in old areas of the city inside the wall and to expanding areas outside the wall.

As products of the industrial age, city hanok included innovations that made use of new materials pouring out of local factories. Bricks replaced stones for exterior walls and glass replaced paper in the windows. Large glass windows facing the courtyard often had a set of paper-covered windows on the inside that helped to keep out drafts in the cold Seoul winters. The interior courtyard, or madang, was often paved in concrete with tile covering the border areas. The small lots required a number of design changes. Limited space, for example, made it difficult to dedicate space for long eaves so these were shortened and gutters installed to catch rainwater. The houses, each with an interior courtyard, came in standard shapes similar to letters of the Korean hangeul writing system. Large houses were shaped like the letter mieum (ㅁ), mid-sized houses like the letter digeut (ㄷ) and small houses like the letter giyeok (ㄱ). Odd-shaped lots made for some exceptions but most conformed to one of these patterns.

The most famous place for city hanok in Seoul is the Bukchon neighborhood that sits between Gyeongbokgung Palace and Changdeokgung Palace. The houses in Gahoe-dong, the most photographed part of the neighborhood, were built in the mid-1930s by Segwon Jeong (1888–1965), a house builder who is credited with developing the city hanok style. Jeong was part of the cultural nationalist movement that began in the 1920s. Demonstrations advocating Korean independence spread around the nation on March 1, 1919. The Japanese put down the demonstrations but adopted a more lenient form of rule. Newspapers in Korean appeared and Korean cultural activity increased. The cultural nationalists were interested in promoting Korean cultural activity in order to preserve Korean identity amid the weight of Japanese rule. The wealthy Jeong knew many of the movement’s leaders and contributed financially to their cause.

Dusk in midsummer in Seoul brings a breeze into the courtyard and through the house. As in a traditional hanok, the courtyard here functions as an extension of the living space but with a modern twist: a glass roof between the two wings of the house allows the courtyard-cum-patio to be used on rainy days.

Like many preservation activists today, Jeong feared that development would destroy the Korean character of the city. Large lots that once held aristocratic estates in Bukchon were in danger because owners who had fallen on hard times after the collapse of the Joseon Dynasty in 1910 were being forced to sell their property to survive. Jeong wanted to prevent the Japanese from moving in, so he bought much of Gahoe-dong with the intention of developing it in Korean style.

Segwon Jeong’s Korean style first developed in Ikseondong, an area south of Bukchon that has become a “hanok island” in the center of Seoul. In 1930, Jeong bought a large plot of empty land where a small detached royal palace once stood. He divided the land into smaller lots and put alleys in between them for access. Lots in different alleys varied in size so that houses of different sizes could be built. In this new space, he first tested the construction of city hanok on a large scale. The houses, of varying shapes and sizes, were built en masse and then sold after construction ended. The roots of the city hanok remain clearly on display in Ikseon-dong today: rows of houses with brick walls, short eaves, glass windows and brick and tile walls. Front doors lead into small courtyards that provide access to all the rooms. In Ikseon-dong, Jeong achieved his goal of a developing a “Korean-style house for Koreans” and later applied the lessons learned to Gahoe-dong, his magnum opus.

By the late 1930s, the Japanese war effort brought residential construction to a halt. In 1942, the thirty-three core members of the Korean Language Society were sent to jail as “subversives” and Jeong’s assets were confiscated because of his support for the group. The dark years of World War II were followed by political turmoil after liberation in August of 1945. Competition between the United States and the Soviet Union exacerbated the turmoil and led to the creation of two states in 1948. In 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea, leading to a bitter war that ended with a ceasefire in 1953. The war left both Koreas in ruins.

Paper is an important material in hanok. Windows, which also serve as doors, are covered with paper that is replaced every couple of years. This room has screens—a modern convenience—that run behind the papered windows and the exterior windows.

Many older large hanok dating from the early twentieth century have Western-style rooms, mostly for entertaining foreign guests, but with traditional Korean details.

Recovery from the war was slow in South Korea, but it moved forward. Damage to Bukchon was minimal because the city changed hands quickly as the front line moved south and then north. As Korea recovered from the war, construction of city hanok resumed, though not on the mass scale of the 1930s, and continued until the mid-1960s.

The Korean economy took off in the mid-1960s, which caused the population of Seoul and other major cities to surge as young people poured into the cities to fill jobs in booming factories. To deal with the housing shortage, the government focused its efforts on building apartment complexes. The economic boom and incumbent social change caused Koreans to turn away from their cultural heritage and to embrace, in particular, Western and American lifestyles. The combination of government policy and social change caused the city hanok to fall out of favor, causing carpenters, roofers and stone cutters to look for work in other fields. By the 1990s, only a handful of skilled hanok craftsmen remained and most worked on restoring and maintaining cultural relics.

Perhaps because of its location between the two most important royal palaces, Bukchon always had a special place in the hearts and minds of Korean architects and cultural activists. Famous architect Swoogeun Kim (1931–86), for example, grew up in Bukchon, as did many other luminary cultural figures of the twentieth century. From its beginning in the mid-1930s to the early 1970s, Bukchon was home to educated and well-off Koreans. After prestigious high schools in Bukchon moved to newly developed areas south of the Hangang River in the mid-1970s, property values began to decline as wealthy Koreans moved out. By the late 1970s, architects and others began to worry about the future of Bukchon and encouraged the city government to take a more active role in preservation. In 1984, the government responded by creating the Gahoe-dong Hanok Preservation District. The move prevented any construction that altered the appearance of the hanok but this frustrated residents who wanted to update their house to changing lifestyles.

As Seoul boomed in the last third of the twentieth century, the city hanok was on the verge of extinction. The situation greatly worsened in the early 1990s after changes in building laws allowed the construction of multi-floor, multi-family dwellings on the small lots of land where hanok once stood. In the span of a few years, hanok and other low-rise houses were destroyed at a torrid pace and replaced by three- and four-story multi-family dwellings. The destruction even spread to Bukchon, particularly after restrictions on new construction in the preservation district were lifted. Construction companies eager to build apartment complexes approached residents in areas with a high concentration of hanok and encouraged them to participate in redevelopment, which meant demolishing the entire neighborhood and building an apartment complex. As apartment prices soared, the lure of a making a profit by leaving an aging, inconvenient house was too strong to ignore and many residents become supporters of redevelopment.

After the massive wave of hanok destruction in the early 1990s, preservationists and the city government became alarmed and began work on plans to protect what was left of Bukchon. Recognizing that the rigid restrictions of the 1980s left owners unhappy and houses in bad condition, the city decided to adopt a system of incentives to help owners renovate their houses. The system offered an outright cash grant combined with a no-interest loan to hanok owners who renovated their houses according to architecture and design guidelines. As word of the coming change spread, aficionados of traditional Korean culture began to buy hanok in Bukchon with the aim of renovating them. By the early 2000s, the economy had recovered from the 1997 economic crisis and renovations to hanok in Bukchon began in earnest and continue, albeit at a slower pace, today.

The first wave of renovations caused controversy because it changed the appearance of the houses considerably. Preservationists were alarmed at the extent of the changes and began to complain that the scale of the renovations went beyond what was necessary and, in some cases, equaled new construction. Architects and builders, meanwhile, argued that the houses needed a full-scale gut renovation or, in some cases, complete reconstruction so that they could be updated to contemporary needs. The city’s design guidelines complicated the matter because they required owners to abandon the aesthetics of the city hanok in favor of traditional Joseon-period aesthetics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sliding glass windows were replaced by outward-opening windows with a dense lattice typical of traditional Korean design. Traditional Korean paper was pasted onto glass panes to make the windows look traditional. This created a neo-traditional or “neo-Joseon” style that evoked images of rural gentry, or yangban, living in country estates.