Sanun Maeul

Peter Rowe, Har Ye Kan

Description

This project description is an excerpt from the longer article “Housing and Landscapes”. For a comparative analysis and further data on this and all other categories including accompanying graphs, please see the article “A Turning Point”.

Particular ensembles of houses and landscapes can be and have been used in national and regional circumstances to remake and restate terms of reference for modern mass housing, away from prevailing conditions. One such circumstance can be found in the broader Seoul Metropolitan area of South Korea, otherwise dominated by housing in the form of high-rise ‘towers in a park’, at least since they gained popular traction from the 1960s onwards. A project of note in the reaction to prevailing circumstances is Sanun Maeul in the Pangyo new area, dating from 2005 to 2010.

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“Pangyo Sanuntown Humansia Terrace-Type Apartment 7”, Archiworld Magazine 199 (2011): 114–121.

This project is by the newly formed Land and Housing Corporation, a merger between the Korean Housing Corporation and Korean Land, both public companies engaged in property development and yet nowadays finding it difficult to compete in markets dominated by private entities. Designed by Kunwon, the project had two large objectives. One was to provide for and demonstrate the efficacy of more diversified publicly-sponsored housing. The other was to help make the Land and Housing Corporation more profitable and assist in defraying its large public debt. In a not uncommon trend elsewhere in the world, as South Koreans have become wealthier, the diversity of now active demand for housing has intensified away from the otherwise normal, high-rise apartments of modest size and accoutrements. At Sanun Maeul, the response was lower-density, multiple-unit housing and community center provision with a distinctive landscape setting. The project is comprised of 208 dwelling units on a six-hectare site on a relatively steep hillside, with units ranging in size from 131 to 208 square meters. Unlike many earlier housing projects in and around Seoul, the project cleverly engages with its site and internal spatial arrangements to establish meaningful connections with landscape in three different ways. The first is the building complex in its broader landscape of a hillside with a characteristic mountainous backdrop. The second involves buildings with landscapes in the form of outdoor terraces and newly-created grounds. The third is in the form of landscapes adjacent to buildings, both in a normal vegetated manner, as well as in the provision of unusual hardscapes and water gardens.