Conflicting ideals and realities: the architecture of South Korea’s first high-rise housing complex

Abstract

This article investigates how the architecture of the Yeouido Sibum Apartments portrays the social, cultural, and political ideals and realities of the postwar South Korean developing state of the 1960s and 1970s. Built as the tallest and most sophisticated apartment complex in Seoul at the time, the Yeouido Sibum Apartments was designed as an ideal family housing complex for the city’s emerging upper middle-class residents. Given the symbolic importance of apartment construction under Chung Hee Park’s regime that promoted the rapid modernisation of the country, the project played a significant role in visualising an ideal modern city that sustained western lifestyles. In this context, the architects of the Yeouido Sibum Apartments used western community planning strategies in designing a closed, car-oriented, and self-sufficient community. This was visualised in urban and industrial images of axis and monumentality in an age of fast-track mass construction of apartments. In addition, the project attempted to actualise contemporary modernist architectural ideals within the realities of South Korea’s economic constraints and the technological limitations of its construction industry. As such, the Yeouido Sibum Apartments project shows how young South Korean architects reacted to global developments by designing the first high-rise model apartment complex in the postwar period.