46 Restoring the Past
Chapter 2. Floor Plans of Mass-Produced Hanok in Gwangju
I
n the first chapter, we briefly learned the background story behind the hanok houses that we can easily see in older neighborhoods of Gwangju. Those are massproduced hanok built to solve the city’s overpopulation during the 1960–70s by many different private developers. The hanok of that era have a lot of different influences from many different cultural backgrounds, like from China, Japan, and Western culture. After reading the last article, you might have had some interest in those hanok and maybe tried to look around older areas of Gwangju to see how they look. But a lot of hanok would probably be hidden under extension roofs or behind high walls, making it hard to find a house you can have access to. As a carpenter fixing such houses, I have gotten lots of chances to visit and see all their structures in various forms. Though many houses have been renovated over the decades, making it hard to see their original plans, I have found a few houses that have remained intact, and this has helped me find the pattern of structures and floorplans of mass-produced hanok. In this chapter, I would like to share some floorplan blueprints that I collected and talk
www.gwangjunewsgic.com
October 2021
CULTURE & ARTS
By Kang Dong-su
▲ A house in Dongmyeong-dong with one additional living unit (Room 4). This room used to have its own door to the outside with a lot more windows and was used as a bed-cum-sitting room with a heated floor system.
2021�10��.indd 46
about how the floorplans of mass-produced hanok look, in addition to tracing the origin of their designs. SIMILAR BUT DIFFERENT Compared to Seoul’s mass-produced hanok, patterns of Gwangju’s are quite simple. Long, rectangular shapes, or L-shaped floorplans, are the most common design. The general concept of this design derived from nobles’ and other rich people’s houses in the Honam area in the past. Especially common were the L-shaped hanok in which the extension was smaller than the main section. These were a particularly popular and commonly built model in Gwangju during the 1960–70s, as they were a symbol of a noble’s house. That special extension contained an area called numaru (누마루), which had been a place for enjoying poetry, calligraphy, painting, or inviting guests during the Joseon Dynasty. It usually is higher than other rooms and is open for better views of the landscape, featuring an open space with no doors or windows and a void space under the Koreanstyle wooden floor, much like a pavilion. It was essentially a hybrid of a house and a pavilion. This design slightly changed starting in the early 20th century, as homeowners started to use glass sliding doors to make that space a sitting room, decorating and furnishing it with Western furniture. But it was still only built for rich or high-ranking people who could afford such made-to-order luxury houses. As the region developed economically, this tradition lived on in Gwangju’s mass-produced urban hanok, and the extension became a bed-cum-sitting room, which still had a similar structure and more windows for better lighting but with a closed ceiling and heated floor system. Another change was that these spaces usually had built-in cabinets for displays or built-in closets depending on the main purpose of the room. THE DISAPPEARANCE OF DAECHEONG-MARU AND THE SURVIVAL OF TOEN-MARU One of the changes we can see from mass-produced hanok is the disappearance of daecheong-maru (대청마루). This
2021-09-28 �� 11:20:53
