The Law of Conservation of Activities in Domestic Space

Until the early twentieth century, for hundreds of years, the housing prototype in Seoul has been a courtyard house where a central open space is surrounded by building blocks and fence. Through the twentieth century, as new modern types of houses emerged, the housing culture began to change and consequently this prototype began to make transformations. This evolutionary process necessarily accompanied the functional change of room activities; some rooms acquired more activities and some lost them; and some has lost all the activities and became extinct. This paper attempts to analyse the housing evolution in Seoul by measuring the ″space-activity interactions″. Through the analysis, it is found that, at the collective level, the basic home activities are preserved through the formal change of the house. Without leaving the domestic field, they are decomposed into separate elements, re-distributed into other spaces, and then re-combined to characterise a new type of space. This is the internal spatial mechanism by which the old house is gradually transformed into a new house

Social Hierarchy Materialized: Korean Vernacular Houses as a Medium to Transfer Confucian Ideology

Buildings reveal the social values of a society through their forms and configuration. During the Choseon dynasty, Confucianism was the national ideology and basis for governing principles. Consequently, houses for the ruling class were built to conform to the principle of separating domains for men, women, servants, and ancestors. This hierarchical social system persisted for hundreds of years, but from the 19th century, various social movements gradually delegitimized many inequalities between sexes and classes. Mysteriously, even after this series of radical political and social changes, vernacular houses still adhered to the same hierarchical spatial order until the mid-20th century. This paper analyzes the houses built from the 15th century to the mid-20th century to show how Confucian principles were translated into the design to control social interactions. The paper concludes with a discussion of how Confucianism has been passed on through the medium of housing until today and how they have influenced people’s perception of different gender roles in contemporary Korean society

Interpretable Housing for Freedom of the Body: The Next Generation of Flexible Homes

If we have gone through the first generation of housing design that pursued functional optimization, ergonomics, and circulation efficiency during the last century, now we are living in the second generation where more advanced goals, such as universal design, ubiquitous design, sustainable design, and environment-friendly design, are emphasized. Al-though this second generation of design focuses upon the wellness of humans in accordance with environment, it still has the attitude that a more precisely designed home can guarantee a better life. What lacks in this approach is the free-dom of the body; it needs to make its own choice as to how to use a space. Thus, it is suggested in this paper that what is important in designing a home is to provide alternatives in daily lives so as to make a full exploration of a given space. These alternatives can be made by offering residents an interpretable space where they can figure out space usages and routs in a constantly changing context. Two spatial devices are discussed in depths as a way to realize this interpretable house: room-to-room enfilade and ring spatial structure. By investigating some existing house plans, it is illustrated how they can guarantee the freedom of the body, and thus alternatives for the flexible domestic life

A Meaning of Baroque in terms of Space Syntax

A city is a spatial system that is generated in the process of searching for an ideal form. From the structure of a city, we can find paradigms of the past in which worldviews of the society are instilled. Baroque, to be studied in this paper, is interpreted as a change from ′limitation′ to ′infinity′. There are many studies that investigated Baroque but they see the change from a single viewpoint of either cosmology or practicality. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to combine these two viewpoints for a comprehensive understanding of what paradigm has formed Baroque cities. Practicality is revealed by means of Space Syntax and our new concept, Urban Entropy Coefficient (: UEC), which is then related to cosmology. We conclude that the intention of Baroque was to configure a Multi-Center layout for the dynamic function of the city

Measuring the Needs for Medical Service in the Retirement Residential Community in Korea

Medical facilities in retirement residential areas provide diverse medical and health-related services to retirees, and they are equipped and programed with various medical services for enhancing retirees’ daily activities. To find out the current status of using medical facilities by retirees, this study surveyed retirees in their fifties, sixties, and seventies, who live in Eunpyeong-gu, Seoul. The survey data was sorted by the types of medical facilities they visit, reasons for their visit, and the types of medical facilities in a retirement residential area they would prefer to visit. The pros and cons of using private and general hospitals can be evaluated further to set up the right strategy to reconcile them; and each type of hospital can be improved by adding those missing elements that the interviewees mentioned. In the broad perspective, this indicates the need to suggest the direction of preparing residential areas that are technically planned for retirees on the basis of the analysis of Korean retirees’ needs

Relocation and Place Attachment: Housing Design as an Enabler of Belonging

Place attachment can be described as an emotional bond between people and places, usually residential, implying securing feelings in the object of attachment, sense of belonging, desire of proximity, and wish to come back when away. Moreover, the disruption of place attachment through forced relocation (such as in a context of conflict or natural disaster) can have severe health and psychological effects. Potentially complicated in any context, the need to provide housing becomes very difficult when limited land for a growing number of population forces to relocate from the rural to the urban environment, and it may involve breaking with long established socio-cultural traditions and structures. The aims of this paper are therefore threefold: first, to critically review previous evidence that relates place attachment and unconscious place-specific daily routines, presenting time-space routines as a key element in the development of a sense of belonging; second, to illustrate spatial sequence in Malaysian domestic space as an enabler of belonging for those dwellers that relocate from traditional housing to modern apartments. And third, with the results of the aforementioned study, to provide further evidence of the social dimension of place attachment as played out in a residential context. In doing so, this article expands on current literature supporting the need for a perspective on place attachment that reflects its socially constructed nature

Fine-grained parallelism for post-pandemic cities: 12 design strategies for resilient urban planning

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we live in the city. Social distancing will remain as a provisional code of conduct for unforeseeable outbreaks of pandemic diseases in the future. Social distancing is predicated upon reduced density of people in any given space and time. Since urban sprawl has been proved to be unsustainable, spreading out the urban density to suburbs cannot be the right direction to achieve this. Fine-grained parallelism is proposed as a single theoretical framework for an alternative post-pandemic urbanism. It is a way of maintaining simultaneous movement and co-presence, two essential properties of urban living, without the risk of crowding, by reconceptualising the existing spatial setting in a finer resolution. Existing urban spaces that have been underused, ill-used or unused can be reconfigured to achieve fine-grained urbanism for the resilient post-pandemic city

Final Report: Incremental SI(structure-infill) Housing for Low-income Population in Malaysia

This research suggests a new approach to the design of low cost housing in Malaysia, especially for those who relocate themselves from rural villages or urban squatters. Whereas low cost housing construction has managed to catch up with the planned target, urban highrise apartments do not provide appropriate domestic space to meet the people’s needs. Dissatisfied with their houses and surrounding conditions, residents lose their attachment to the community. From the architect’s perspective, we believe that one of the main reasons behind this malfunction is the spatial configuration of the house plan. Soaring price of available urban plots makes it the best option to build highrise flats for new housing constructions, and especially for low cost housing, it became an unavoidable choice. Since the design of multi-level collective housing typically imposes limits to plan configuration, this has entailed a sudden transition of domestic living pattern from old to new. How can we accommodate Malay vernacularism into the modernised urban home? This was the question we asked to tackle the issue of providing affordable homes to low income people. In the following chapters, we will make an overview on affordable housing in general and take an in-depth review on the situation in Malaysian affordable housing market combined with the squatter problem. Based on these, some proposals will be made for a new design approach for the apartment housing typology in Malaysian urban setting. In the course of design development, we tried to make sure the solution will be socially, environmentally, and economically sustainable. Through the field visits, seminars and forums, we tried to illuminate deep-rooted problems and then actively delivered our ideas to squatter residents, research institutes, local authorities, and stakeholders. The design schemes are now at the basic level, but its innovative concept will be offering a new opportunity to stimulate the housing industry in Malaysia for the low income population. In the wider perspective, we believe that this will eventually contribute to the economic development of the country

Determinant Factors of Pedestrian Volume in Different Land-Use Zones: Combining Space Syntax Metrics with GIS-Based Built-Environment Measures

This study combined space syntax metrics and geographic information systems (GIS)-based built-environment measures to analyze pedestrian volume in different land-use zones, as recorded in unique public data from a pedestrian volume survey of 10,000 locations in Seoul, Korea. The results indicate that most of the built-environment variables, such as density, land use, accessibility, and street design measures, showed statistically significant associations with pedestrian volume. Among the syntactic variables, global integration showed a statistically significant association with the average pedestrian volume in residential and commercial zones. In contrast, local integration turned out to be an important factor in the commercial zone. Therefore, this study concludes that the syntactic variables of global and local integration, as well as some built-environment variables, should be considered as determinant factors of pedestrian volume, though the effects of those variables varied by land-use zone. Therefore, planning and public policies should use tailored approaches to promote urban vitality through pedestrian volume in accordance with each land-use zone’s characteristics