Living with the elements: the Korean house; In Korea, the relationship between climate, culture and building generates a distinctive domestic architecture that works with, rather than against, the elements and has wider lessons for building and living in harmony with nature

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 2004 by Peter Blundell Jones

Most architects know the famous photographs of the Katsura Palace at Kyoto in Japan and have marvelled at the subtle treatment of the ground plane: the apparently casual but carefully placed stepping-stones in the grass, the studied juxtaposition of semi-random slabs which makes up the nonetheless strictly rectangular path to the entrance, the yet more rectangular steps up to the front door, and the final, perfectly cut, smooth stone block of the doorstep leading on to the wooden platform of the interior. The sequence of thresholds starting earlier with the garden gate and ending later at the hearth--is accompanied by a series of transitions from edited or remade nature to the full artifice of culture; from the raw to the cooked. I had assumed that this was unique to Japan until a recent visit to Korea, where I was shown traditional buildings ranging from palaces to humble farmhouses. Nothing quite caught the refinement of Katsura but much that a Westerner admires in that Japanese example was evidently part of a common tradition, doubtless connected with climate, with customs, and with materials and craftsmanship. Down the centuries Korea was the bridge between Japan and imperial China, so it shares cultural values with both, but only Korean architecture has had underfloor heating since the later stone age. (1)

Culture and climate

The climate is hot and humid in summer, chilly in winter, though parts of Japan can have deep snow. Their cultural tradition was simply to put up with the cold, enjoying limited heat from a charcoal brazier at privileged moments. (2) In somewhat colder northern China there is the alternative tradition of the kang, a broad masonry shelf a metre or so off the floor on which people can sit or lie. Heated by smoke from a wood fire beneath, this works like an Alpine corner stove, and has naturally become the inner sanctum, the most homely and privileged place in the house. The Korean heated floor extends this stove to operate on a whole room, like a Roman hypocaust. It consists of thin stone slabs propped on vertical stones to leave a void beneath, and hot gases from a wood fire lit in a chamber tucked under one side are sucked through underneath to a low flue at the other. On top the slabs are rendered over to seal them, then covered with oiled mulberry paper to leave a perfectly smooth yellow continuous surface turned up at the skirting. In cold periods much of family life could be enacted on this gently warmed floor surface, a place for both sitting and sleeping.

But arguably in these countries it is the summer climate that has most deeply influenced traditional buildings. The need for cross-ventilation resulted in a preference for plans one room wide and for buildings to be free-standing, though usually they are grouped to define courtyards (the larger complexes run them in progressive series as in China). Flimsy, removable walls and sliding screens were adopted to encourage airflow, and raised platform floors let it penetrate beneath. In Korea, a well-insulated oversailing roof with two layers of timbers separated by an earthen blanket provided the essential sunshade. Daily life took place for much of the year in semioutdoor rooms: most important was the open hall centrally placed on the wooden platform and open to the south, while continuous with the roofed gallery or veranda running across the whole front. Sometimes this open hall is closeable with screens that swing down from the ceiling. In addition, there can be an even more exposed room at one end, open to the air on three sides. It is often raised on to a higher platform for a better vantage point and higher status.

The flimsiness of walls as opposed to the solidity of the roof has led to an architecture on posts--potentially a fully open hall--with lateral stability assured purely by the interlocking roof construction. The geometric elaboration of the double-layered hips produces the characteristic curved ridges and eaves of Oriental architecture, but it also requires each roof to be a free-standing entity, for joining them at corners to make L-shaped ranges is a messy compromise, usually avoided apart from on lowly service buildings. By the same token, the elaborate interlocking joints at roof corners, made without nails or pegs, became the points of greatest architectural elaboration, with carved and highly coloured brackets in the case of temples. As a pure prefabricated assemblage of timber, this roof on posts needs a stone platform to get it off the ground and to take the sometimes heavy rain harmlessly away. But more important still are the social requirements answered by the raised interior.

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Domestic arrangements

In the traditional Korean house, all rooms but the kitchen are poised some 600-800mm above the surrounding ground. The open hall and galleries have suspended timber floors, and, rather than running floorboards over joists as we do, they use short tongued planks to span between grooves in the supporting beams. The top surface of both beams and planks is finished to a high polish. Inner parts of the house with heated floors use the platform height to accommodate the fire and flue-chamber, ending up slightly lower than the wooden floor, the two being separated by a threshold member which receives the sliding, folding or dropping screens that constitute doors and windows. In the absence of glass, the traditional material was rice-paper glued to a fine grille of wood. On the inside you see only paper, until light reveals the gridded pattern and the sun casts gridded shadows on the smooth yellow floor.