The buildings are loved by the collector, cared for and maintained such that there is no dirt, no matter out of place as Mary Douglas might express it.
This establishes a distinction between patina and dirt, a category difference between the acceptable and unacceptable elements of wear and tear.
Baudrillard discusses the collected object as a pet: cared for, but controlled and neutered. The nature of the building is denied, the photographer’s studio on site bears all the hallmarks of such a space, the equipment in place, studio lighting and backdrops, but it is not permitted to behave as a studio. The buildings belong to a similar period, in order to evoke 1920s and 1930s Tokyo;
this series is important in giving some coherence to the collection. The mix of urban and rural structures accentuates the unsettling nature of the space, however: despite belonging to similar eras, the co-mingling of a farmhouse with urban and suburban modernism underscores the feeling that this place is not as it might wish to appear.
The buildings in the museum are exemplars, each carefully selected and curated. This erases much of the ordinariness from the architecture: the homes are those of famous poets and architects, not representative of the general population; the bath house preserved is both typical and a worth example: a Platonic ideal of the Japanese bath house of this era. Many other bath houses went un-collected, perhaps lacking the tile mural of Mount Fuji or the coherent composition of this example.
The root of the disjointed experience is how it attempts to arrest time:
erasing traces of inhabitation from unwanted eras, the buildings are dressed to conform to a precise point in time and then held there. This is self-evidently part of the museum’s narrative, but it is one which places the experience in this strange transition between exhibit and architecture. The museum as it stands attests to some of the ways in which we read architecture as we find it in the world: underlining the importance of context and temporality, the engagement with the wider environment and how it accommodates the passing of time, either by alternative occupation, remodelling, or even simply by containing some more contemporary objects and furnishings. As well as offering a window into Shoˉwa Tokyo, the museum sharpens how we view architecture in the wider world, and the importance of subtle cues to temporality and context.
and decorated with geometric patterns, with timber construction for the interior and curving tile roofs. A unique system of underfloor heating has a long history in hanok construction, and the homes themselves are occupied, often adapted to modern needs (Figure 4.5)15 evidenced by air conditioning units, utility company meters on the exterior and above-ground electricity supply.
Two areas which gather these together are Bukcheon and Namsangol (Figure 4.6). Bukcheon is a bustling mixed residential and small-scale retail area on a steep hilly part of the city. The tone of the area is quiet and low rise, with contemporary architecture carefully designed to work alongside the traditional. The low-rise element is particularly notable in Seoul, a city constrained geographically by mountains, meaning that the modern parts of the city are extremely high in density. The pressure on land as the country modernized leads to a large number of hanoks being demolished, and it wasn’t until the 1990s that preservation strategies began in earnest. Now, there are three simultaneous strategies for preserving hanok living. The first is preservation of existing hanoks, protecting them and conserving them. Often, this conservation involves a similar strategy of dismantling and relocation to the open-air museum noted in Tokyo above. The issues with decontextualization are more complicated here, as the hanok houses are often relocated in a sensitive manner, alongside other similar structures in order to assemble a coherent district. Where these houses retain their function as dwellings, the villages are relatively successful – if turned into tourist attractions in their own right as picturesque photo opportunities. Some
FIGURE 4.5 Author’s photograph of hanok adapted to contemporary use showing ventilation and utility meters.
examples are retained as museums to hanok living, however. This presents a similar set of circumstances to the open-air museum, rendering the buildings as exemplars by divesting them of their function as homes.
The second strategy is pursued at Namsangol: the preservation of hanok living by promoting and producing new houses according to an established standard. This is somewhat different to the strategies presented above and involves the creation of a historical standard from the remaining buildings.
A series of discernments are then made as to what constitutes a true hanok and what falls outside of this definition: how many concessions can be made to modern living? This definition is provided in part by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport via the National Hanok Competition16 where a range of contemporary examples of hanok are publicized.
This distillation of the collected hanoks into a set of parameters or rules represents a further step in the architecture of collection, an attempt to reconstruct a historical form by keeping it in step with contemporary conditions.
Part of this is similar to the development of mingei as an appreciation of folk art in Japan, with the aesthetic qualities of mak and bium described by Byoungso Cho.17 Mak, in this instance, is a kind of crudeness borne of spontaneity, represented by the roughness of timbers and how they meet FIGURE 4.6 Author’s photograph of Namsangol Hanok Village: an example of the open-air museum approach.
stone foundations. Bium denotes a kind of emptiness, offering a description of the courtyard void at the heart of the hanok to Cho. The celebration of the raw materials, untreated and showing imperfections, gives traditional Korean architecture part of its aesthetic. This becomes codified in the new hanok (Figure 4.7), counter to Cho’s discussion of the improvisatory nature of Korean arts more broadly: collection, even operating in the mode of reconstruction and new building, serves to ossify and freeze things into a series.