Living with the elements: the Korean house; In Korea, the relationship between climate, culture and building generates a distinctive domestic architecture that works with, rather than against, the elements and has wider lessons for building and living in harmony with nature.

Most architects know the famous photographs of the Katsura Palace at Kyoto in Japan and have marvelled at the subtle treatment of the ground plane: the apparently casual but carefully placed stepping-stones in the grass, the studied juxtaposition of semi-random slabs which makes up the nonetheless strictly rectangular path to the entrance, the yet more rectangular steps up to the front door, and the final, perfectly cut, smooth stone block of the doorstep leading on to the wooden platform of the interior. The sequence of thresholds starting earlier with the garden gate and ending later at the hearth--is accompanied by a series of transitions from edited or remade nature to the full artifice of culture; from the raw to the cooked. I had assumed that this was unique to Japan until a recent visit to Korea, where I was shown traditional buildings ranging from palaces to humble farmhouses. Nothing quite caught the refinement of Katsura but much that a Westerner admires in that Japanese example was evidently part of a common tradition, doubtless connected with climate, with customs, and with materials and craftsmanship. Down the centuries Korea was the bridge between Japan and imperial China, so it shares cultural values with both, but only Korean architecture has had underfloor heating since the later stone age. (1)

Culture and climate

The climate is hot and humid in summer, chilly in winter, though parts of Japan can have deep snow. Their cultural tradition was simply to put up with the cold, enjoying limited heat from a charcoal brazier at privileged moments. (2) In somewhat colder northern China there is the alternative tradition of the kang, a broad masonry shelf a metre or so off the floor on which people can sit or lie. Heated by smoke from a wood fire beneath, this works like an Alpine corner stove, and has naturally become the inner sanctum, the most homely and privileged place in the house. The Korean heated floor extends this stove to operate on a whole room, like a Roman hypocaust. It consists of thin stone slabs propped on vertical stones to leave a void beneath, and hot gases from a wood fire lit in a chamber tucked under one side are sucked through underneath to a low flue at the other. On top the slabs are rendered over to seal them, then covered with oiled mulberry paper to leave a perfectly smooth yellow continuous surface turned up at the skirting. In cold periods much of family life could be enacted on this gently warmed floor surface, a place for both sitting and sleeping.

But arguably in these countries it is the summer climate that has most deeply influenced traditional buildings. The need for cross-ventilation resulted in a preference for plans one room wide and for buildings to be free-standing, though usually they are grouped to define courtyards (the larger complexes run them in progressive series as in China). Flimsy, removable walls and sliding screens were adopted to encourage airflow, and raised platform floors let it penetrate beneath. In Korea, a well-insulated oversailing roof with two layers of timbers separated by an earthen blanket provided the essential sunshade. Daily life took place for much of the year in semioutdoor rooms: most important was the open hall centrally placed on the wooden platform and open to the south, while continuous with the roofed gallery or veranda running across the whole front. Sometimes this open hall is closeable with screens that swing down from the ceiling. In addition, there can be an even more exposed room at one end, open to the air on three sides. It is often raised on to a higher platform for a better vantage point and higher status.

The flimsiness of walls as opposed to the solidity of the roof has led to an architecture on posts--potentially a fully open hall--with lateral stability assured purely by the interlocking roof construction. The geometric elaboration of the double-layered hips produces the characteristic curved ridges and eaves of Oriental architecture, but it also requires each roof to be a free-standing entity, for joining them at corners to make L-shaped ranges is a messy compromise, usually avoided apart from on lowly service buildings. By the same token, the elaborate interlocking joints at roof corners, made without nails or pegs, became the points of greatest architectural elaboration, with carved and highly coloured brackets in the case of temples. As a pure prefabricated assemblage of timber, this roof on posts needs a stone platform to get it off the ground and to take the sometimes heavy rain harmlessly away. But more important still are the social requirements answered by the raised interior.

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Domestic arrangements

In the traditional Korean house, all rooms but the kitchen are poised some 600-800mm above the surrounding ground. The open hall and galleries have suspended timber floors, and, rather than running floorboards over joists as we do, they use short tongued planks to span between grooves in the supporting beams. The top surface of both beams and planks is finished to a high polish. Inner parts of the house with heated floors use the platform height to accommodate the fire and flue-chamber, ending up slightly lower than the wooden floor, the two being separated by a threshold member which receives the sliding, folding or dropping screens that constitute doors and windows. In the absence of glass, the traditional material was rice-paper glued to a fine grille of wood. On the inside you see only paper, until light reveals the gridded pattern and the sun casts gridded shadows on the smooth yellow floor.

As in Japan, the traditional Korean way of life did not involve living rooms and bedrooms and chairs and tables: everything happened on the floor. Meals would be taken cross-legged around a table some 300mm above the floor and bed-rolls would be rolled out at night and put away again in the morning. (3) The lack of furniture--apart from storage chests--meant that rooms could be smaller and gatherings more intimate, but seated eye-level is only about 800mm above the floor. Doors and windows therefore had to be low to allow a view out. Part of the function of the house's platform was to raise the level of view at least to a par with standing outsiders, so privileged householders could give instructions to standing servants and meet the gaze of arriving visitors.

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Sitting on the floor means direct contact, brushing it with your clothes and touching it with feet and hands. It must be kept clean and have a pleasant texture, which takes the most refined form in the oiled paper of the heated rooms; but this is surely also the raison d'etre of the entire polished wood surface of the house platform. Trudging in with hobnail boots would be an insult, let alone an injury, to the fabric, and it is still the general custom in Korea to take off your shoes on entering a building. (4) Removal of shoes creates a pause and a conversion of the self: it is a decisive ritual of entry that helps articulate the threshold. In some Far-Eastern countries, the feet are also washed at this point. In both Korean houses and the Katsura Palace, the shoe-off place is the precisely cut stone step just before the wooden platform. The platform's surface is only broached by a stockinged, slippered or naked foot.

Shoes protect us from mud and sharp stones, but they also distance us from the texture of the ground, even anaesthetize us to it. Taking them off means feeling the floor, the temperature and slipperiness of the surface, the rhythm of jointing in the boards. Without shoes, a heated floor is better appreciated, but adopting the habit must prompt greater awareness of textures underfoot, and this is presumably transferred empathically to textures only grazed by eye, for textures are seen as well as felt, and we connect the two. Stepping down from the platform to depart and put on your shoes, your first footfall is the smooth stone block, but then comes the rougher surface of the building's base. To avoid wet or dirty ground, the retreating visitor (or departing houseowner) picks their way over a path composed of irregular stones. Avoiding stepping on the cracks, they reach the front gate, the outer threshold of the territory. Only here do they meet the mud of the lane, the profane floor of the outer world, which is also the place to mount a horse or ascend a carriage. At Katsura there is a wonderful hierarchy of garden paths: the rough, widely placed stepping stones suggest a more occasional, natural garden walk than the full paving of the approach. The geometry of the house as 'culture' is contrasted with the contrived nature of the garden.

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Thresholds and rituals

In China, Japan and Korea the outer threshold is in many ways as important as the inner, for many ritual welcomings and partings occur at the edge of the territory rather than at the house platform. (5) The outside boundary was traditionally defended by a solid outer wall of mud 600mm or more thick, sometimes with a random stone base to get clear of the wet ground, and with a thatched or tiled roof along the top. The layering of stones into the mud to tie the construction together can be very beautiful, and trouble was evidently taken in turning corners and stepping up slopes. This earth architecture wedded to the ground is opposed to the timber frame of the house poised on its platform with its flimsy and relatively unprotected screens set between the columns: they complement one another. The wall remains unbroken save for its gates, and these must guarantee continuity of enclosure by having roofs over them continuing the roof of the wall, even exaggerating it by combining service buildings with the gate to make a wider threshold. The servants were the gatekeepers.

Every building tradition reflects a culture and a way of life, and everything has changed with modernization. But we might look with envy at the traditional Korean house for its layering of insideness and outsideness, allowing life to retreat to a heated indoors in the worst conditions, but opening up layer by layer with sliding screen and folding door until it becomes a well-ventilated living space in the summer heat under its parasol roof. The most highly protected indoor space is the most 'cultural': delicately lined with paper on all sides and with a papered suspended ceiling, but you step out from there on to a polished wooden floor and semi-enclosed spaces where the underside of the roof structure is visible. The open hall is both more public, for social occasions, and a place where work can be done in the open air yet under cover. The inhabitants can hang out along the edges of the side balcony, still in the embrace of the house, with a commanding view of surrounding garden and beyond. Leaving involves a change of footwear and descent towards the dirty earth, while still protected by the stepping stones. Awareness of the ground plane is acute, both in the changes of level, which signal status, and in the changes of texture and material, from the raw and natural to the refined and artificial. Yet all this spatial articulation occurs within the larger territory of the family compound, girded off against the outside world by wall and gate; for visitors a yet stronger threshold.

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South Korea is a powerful and fast-developing country, but building too fast allows little reflection, and there is much dependence on poor Western models. As in most hot parts of the world, the tendency is towards hermetic deep-plan environments reliant on air-conditioning. Besides the inevitable and ultimately unsustainable energy demand, this also involves a complete negation of the subtleties of transition between inside and out that are so enviable in its traditional architecture. Influenced by Japanese examples, Frank Lloyd Wright showed a century ago that such layerings and spatial transitions could be translated into a Modernist idiom, and there must surely be architects in Korea, as there are in Japan, who are interested in pursuing this. But although much new building is evidently going on, there is little evidence of such ideas being heeded in practice, despite the increased urgency of living with the climate rather than against it.

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1 Archaeological remains showing traces of underfloor heating canals predate the modern era, and there was widespread dissemination of the practice between the fourth century and the seventh century. See Nam-Ung Kim, Stehendes und liegendes Feuer, PhD thesis at the University of Darmstadt, 1994.

2 In her famous autobiography Daughter of a Samurai, Etsu Sugimoto describes the ordeal of lessons as a child in unheated rooms, and being forbidden to fidget as this was considered undignified.

3 The Japanese tatamimat module measures out rooms in terms of potential bed spaces, but this does not apply in Korea.

4 These days racks and shoehorns are usually provided.

5 In Sugimoto's book (see note 2), far more events at the outer gate than at the inner are reported. The roughly equivalent status of the two thresholds in north China is also made clear by Charles Stafford in Separation and Reunion in China, Cambridge University Press, 2000. Stafford's main thesis is that separations and reunions, not only between people but also with deities and ancestors, are especially stressed in Chinese culture.

This article was written after a lecture visit in 2003 at the generous invitations of Professor Kim Chung-Jae of Kyunpook National University Daegu and Dr Alfred Bong Hwangbo of the Seoul National University of Technology. The author is also grateful to Professor Nam-Ung Kim for providing a copy of his German-language thesis Stehendes und liegendes Feuer (Standing and Lying Fire) and for allowing reproduction of his drawings. The house plans and sections are from the research report on the residential site of the Moon clan at Root Village, Nam-pyung, published by Dal-Sung Gun, Daegu City.

All photographs are by Peter Blundell Jones, except nos 3 and 8 by Dr Alfred Bong Hwangbo No 1 (Katsura Place) was published in Tetsuro Yoshida, The Japanese House and Garden, Pall Mall, London 1965, p47.