i2i media lab.

This study explores the development of national housing as a dominant residential type in the Republic of Korea and investigates the role of print media in shaping and disseminating the vision of national housing from the 1940s to the 1970s. Originating during the Japanese colonial period, national housing was institutionalized through a state-led modernization process and framed by evolving visual strategies in newspaper advertisements. By visually analyzing 127 cases including design competitions and housing sales announcements and advertisements, this study identifies a transition from state-driven normative discourse to increasingly commercialized and consumer-oriented representations. Guided by visual theories, the study analyzes how layout, typography, and visual images, including floor plans, site diagrams, and bird’s-eye views communicate the values of national housing. Print media not only delivered state messaging but actively participated in shaping a visual culture of residential modernity. By the 1970s, apartments had become the standardized form of national housing, representing middle class identity and national development. In this context, national housing functioned not merely as a policy instrument but as a culturally constructed visual narrative. Therefore, this study contributes to broader discussions on the reciprocal relationship between national housing, embedded in the discourse of its time, and print media.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Gyeongseong (the former name for Seoul) experienced a significant population increase, leading to severe housing shortages and haphazard, large-scale development. During this time, urban housing blocks were densely clustered Joseon houses often with eaves touching those of neighboring buildings. Despite this, they preserved the Jungjeong-style layouts and reflected the Confucian patriarchal culture. The Jungjeong-style layouts in Joseon houses necessitated ensuring natural sunlight and ventilation and improving interior spaces for women’s convenience and household chores. Consequently, the Jungdang-style experiments in these houses aimed to provide a standard for preserving traditional characteristics, ensuring natural light and ventilation, and enhancing household chore efficiency. These experiments also involved discourses on urban planning and density, taking into account neighboring houses, lots, roads, and building-to-land ratios (floor area ratios). However, the Jungdang-style experiments failed to become a leading discourse in addressing that era’s housing and urban environment issues. Nevertheless, the experiments conducted by Joseon’s architectural experts are significant as they represent social experiments addressing the challenges of haphazard urban architecture in a rapidly urbanizing context and a booming urban population.

Housing in the Joseon Dynasty was regulated by the caste system based on Confucianism and the perceived predominance of men over women. Therefore, the houses and associated dwelling culture of the Joseon populace did not evolve and became stagnant. Although new dwelling cultures and associated houses from abroad through the Gaehwa and the 1876 port-opening were introduced, the dwelling cultures led to stagnant evolution of the houses of the Joseon populace. In this sense, Hui-Dong Go’s house is an extremely rare case, having been built in a relatively economically manner on the parcel of a typical house. Therefore, the current work analyzes Go’s house in comparison with houses proposed in the discourses of premodern and modern dwelling culture at the time in Joseon both before and after the 1876 port-opening, and it then examines the meanings of the dwelling culture that can be drawn from his house. As a result, this study reveals that Go’s house is a highly valuable integration of the dwelling culture, which succeeded the traditional type of Korean housing, improved upon both the problems of Joseon houses and the problems of urban hanoks, and actively accepted and adapted modern residential discourses.

Architects have witnessed the development and evolution of digital architectural reference platforms and the changes in their attitudes towards the reference platforms. To verify this hypothesis, this study investigates the organizational characteristics of architectural reference platforms from analog to digital formats, and analyzes how users produce and consume architectural references on the digital architectural platforms. As a result, the findings are as follows: First, due to changes in visual reference and web technologies, digital architectural platforms have been continuously developed and evolved. Second, it is now possible for users to obtain a variety of information via digital architectural platforms, as opposed to analog platforms. Third, Pinterest as the most evolved platform, has focused more on images themselves than on texts, and thereby users have re-organized and re-spreaded information obtained from image searches on Pinterest. Accordingly, the evolution of web content management on the platforms has gradually led to the changes in users’ attitudes of production and consumption towards the reference platforms, and moreover, caused not only to visually reshape the layout and organization of digital architectural reference platform, but also to accelerate the reproduction of image information.

Digital technology has attempted to blur the boundaries between architectural design and fabrication, which have been established since the Renaissance. However, these boundaries still exist, due to the discontinuity between digital modeling and fabrication, which often derives from errors encountered in the process of file conversion. To bridge this discontinuity, this study intends to identify and analyze the causes of errors during the process of converting 3D modeling to Standard Triangulated Language (STL) file, and then to provide solutions that fix the errors. The STL file errors are results of failing to understand or ignoring the difference between 3D modeling for 3D printing and for visual presentation. For this reason, this study conducted an error analysis using Materialize Magics (STL editing and repairing software) to investigate types of the errors and to suggest ways of repairing 3D modeling with such errors.

The second half of the last century witnessed an explosive interest in architectural media using digital technologies and its corresponding changes in ways of preferring and using architectural media. Specifically, several innovative architects specializing in Computer-Aided Design (CAD) systems have gradually detached the role of conceptual and exemplificational representation from architectural drawing, and then transferred it to digital diagram. However, there were little research focusing on the change in architectural media. Motivated by this observation, this study examines the new role of diagram as an architectural medium and architects’ attitudes towards it in CAD systems, and moreover analyzes the conditions and meanings of shifting from postmodern drawing to digital diagram. First, after an extensive literature review, this study found that the role of digital diagram has been not just changed and fixed, but reorganized and expanded, and thereby it has replaced the role of drawing in postmodern ways of conceptualizing architecture. Moreover, this replacement of postmodern drawing by digital diagram has helped experimental architects transformed their attitudes towards theorizing and designing architecture. Second, through an analysis of the conditions and meaning of transferring form drawing to diagram, this study reached three conclusions: 1) A new paradigm responding to complex conditions of our contemporary society required the shift from existing media to new media; 2) The development of digital technologies allowed architects to changes in ways of representing architecture through architectural media; 3) Beyond the role of generator, diagram in architectural design process caused architects to do their diagrammatic thinking and practice.