I recently took on a design commission from a client who had purchased a lot in a public housing district. As I reviewed the planning guidelines, familiar phrases jumped out at me anew: "Roof pitch shall be approximately such-and-such; fences are discouraged, but if installed, natural materials under 1.2 meters are recommended," and the like. These are the very regulations long seen in district unit plans for new towns such as Bundang in Seongnam and Ilsan in Goyang since some 30 years ago.
Like patches of snow that linger on a mountaintop, refusing to melt even on a warm spring day, guidelines and regulations crafted long ago by someone remain entrenched in our laws, oblivious to the pace of a rapidly changing world. No primary colors or crude mixes of materials; fences best omitted or kept very low; pitched roofs over flat ones; unified color palettes; orderly street trees and yards. Standards conjured up by imagining what was then believed to be the picture of an advanced, dignified middle-class town still loiter like ghosts, grown old and threadbare.
The problem is that such regulations and laws prevent cities from accommodating diverse classes, generations and tastes, suppressing diversity. Aesthetic norms, lifestyle norms and class-based tastes alike have been quietly institutionalized through laws and review committees, producing what amounts to a "standardization of desire." It was a system that designed the streetscape and, beyond that, a mechanism that steered the very way people lived. That is why, walking through our cities, one encounters endlessly repeating similar roofs and exterior walls, fences and yards of comparable height.
The early new-town planners likely imagined that every building would spring into being all at once, just as it appeared in the bird's-eye renderings. Yet uniform rules, with the passage of time, dramatized the differences. Some houses fell into disrepair, others were expanded, still others turned into cafés. When fences were removed, anxieties about invasions of privacy drove people to erect new boundaries with tall hedges, frosted glass and CCTV. Boundaries grew craftier; people built high walls turned outward, fitted small windows, and gravitated toward courtyard-style designs that placed the yard inside. Rows of walls blocked the gaze of the street, and the city flowed in directions the law had never intended.
Walking through Korean cities, one feels a curious familiarity: buildings of similar heights, repeating apartment complexes, rigidly divided land-use zones and excessively detailed building regulations. We tend to think of this simply as the "Korean city." But trace its roots, and much of it links back to the modern Japanese urban legal system. Floor-area ratio, building coverage ratio, land-use zoning, building lines, setback restrictions, districts and zones, building agreements — most of today's architectural terminology comes from the same source. Korea absorbed this framework through the colonial era and postwar urbanization, then reinforced it ever more powerfully during the era of compressed growth.
Even in the 21st century, where everything is in flux, the limits of the architectural field remain. It is far easier and more convenient to borrow tested existing institutions than to fashion new laws and systems. When I serve in advisory capacities for administrative agencies, I often see plans for future buildings drafted on the basis of old guidelines and precedents — sometimes with the typos still uncorrected. To be sure, a city's public character, its sunlight and walkability, its safety and environment, cannot be sustained without shared rules. But if those rules are stagnant and rigid as still water, when will we finally encounter a city freely designed as a living space — one shaped by the collisions of differing tastes and desires, generations and time?
