A Graduate Student Perspective-KI Graduate Summer Research Grant Summer 2015, Sun Min Melany Park, G1, History & Theory of Architecture

My 7-week summer research took me to the Mokchon Architecture Archive in Sajik-dong, Seoul, located a stone’s throw away from Gyeongbokgung. Started by Kim Jung Sik, the founding president of the prominent architecture firm, Junglim, the private archive is the first of its kind to document, among others, drawings and writings of modern Korean architects. Spearheaded by the Kim Jung Sik Foundation, the Mokchon Archive records interviews conducted with first-generation modern architects who practiced in the post-Korean war period. These interviews are eventually published as Korean-language monographs, an oral history project I was privileged to contribute to this summer.            

Together with Professor Pai Hyung Min from University of Seoul, I had the opportunity to interview Ji Soon, the first female architect to be registered in South Korea in 1966, a year after architectural license exams were inaugurated. Most interestingly, in the earliest days that the licensing exams took effect, numerous architects boycotted these exams, insisting that their on-site experience stood in lieu of such an institutionally- and state-driven mandate that made official their expertise in building design, construction, and administration. Given that this was a period when it was considered inauspicious for a female to step foot onto a construction site, it was unsurprising to hear of the challenges Ji was forced to confront on a personal and professional level as a female architect practicing in a male-dominated workplace.

Towards the tail end of the trip, I made a visit to the Kim Joong Up Museum in Anyang located an hour subway ride from Seoul’s city center. A pharmaceutical factory that Kim designed in 1959, the factory was recently converted into a museum, the first dedicated to the oeuvre of a single architect. Inspired by the trip to Kim’s museum, I visited the grounds and interiors of his most well-known commission, the French Embassy in Seoul, its modernist aesthetic reflecting his training under the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier. Kim went on to receive a Chavalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite from the French President Charles de Gaulle in 1965 for his embassy design. I am grateful to the Korea Institute for supporting my summer research, and I very much look forward to my future visits to Seoul. I am excited that my doctoral research will not only source from archival material, but more significantly, contribute directly to the production of South Korea’s first modern architecture archive.