Visualising the invisible: meanings of architectural drawings produced in the early modern Korean context

Abstract

This paper examines the architectural significance of the first architectural drawings on Korean housing conditions produced between 1904 and 1932. Based on the political context of the time and place under investigation, most of the drawings produced at the time reflect Japan’s orientalist perspectives on its Asian neighbours. Nevertheless, due to the close socio-cultural relationships that existed between Japan and Korea in the early 1900s, shared contemporary architectural knowledge, such as positivism and human geography, played an important role in the creation of Korean architectural drawings. In this context, by closely communicating with the Japanese active in the Korean peninsula, Kil-Ryong Park developed his unique architectural approaches to analyse and create Korean housing conditions by producing poetic perspectival drawings without real-life qualities and devising architectural borders and thresholds, while meticulously examining the sites’ microscopic physical and environmental conditions. This research employs the hermeneutic research approach to address the gaps within existing scholarship which has so far focused only on the scientific and utilitarian characteristics of Park’s architectural work.