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