| Summary: | An attempt is made to investigate the housing culture in Seoul to answer the question: how do old spatial values interact with a new domestic setting The argument of this research relates cultural interpretation of housing to plan morphology, and demonstrates how social values and domestic space are interrelated and how their interactions have driven the evolution of housing through the twentieth century. For hundreds of years, the housing form and culture in Seoul have been in consistency with minor changes. After the Korean War (1950-1953), however, a fast and fundamental change was started. A huge amount of houses were constructed with a modern design concept which is completely different from that of the traditional courtyard house. The first part of the analysis focuses on the diachronic process where the traditional courtyard house, which used to be a single dwelling prototype for centuries, is transformed to modern houses. Using space syntax methods, it is shown how old activities are re-accommodated and their symbolic meanings re-negotiated in the modem setting. The second part of the analysis focuses on modern apartment houses that became the most dominant dwelling type in the city from the 70s on. A new graph theoretic method is proposed to facilitate the mathematical exploration of sample plans, and it is revealed that the old topological relations of space still operate within the formal constraints of the apartment houses. Synthesising these analyses, it is evaluated that what appears on the surface to be a radical change preserves at a deeper level the genotypical values of space that generate a gradual and continuous evolution. The old and new houses in Seoul are, therefore, separate only at the physical level, not at the spatial level.
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