Colonial Korea, revealed
South Korea has the world’s 15th largest economy. The capital, Seoul, is a sprawling high-rise megacity of 10 million. From the air, Seoul’s Gangnam District alone — with its glittering verticals of glass and steel stitched with superhighways — looks like the pinnacle of modernity. Yet South Korea’s architecture is little studied outside its own borders. When scholars ponder the built environment of East Asia, they still do so through the lens of Japan. A recent conference at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) provided a corrective gesture. “(Un)Building Colonial Space in Korea, 1910-1945” was the first conference at a North American architecture school for scholars exploring the intersection of Korean architecture and history. The session asked: What can cultural uses of space, landscape, and the built environment teach us about the past? The interdisciplinary gathering explored new ways of seeing architecture, beginning with South Korea, through the lenses of history, literature, archaeology,...