Korean Architecture

Korean architecture is the building tradition of the Korean peninsula, best known through the hanok: a timber-framed house with a heavy tiled or thatched roof, heated floors and rooms arranged around open yards, sited with care for mountains, water and the seasons. The same carpentry shaped royal shrines, palaces and Buddhist temples, and today it informs Korean architects who renovate old houses or borrow their spatial logic for new homes, cafés and libraries.

What is Korean architecture?

The term covers more than one style. At its core is the hanok, the traditional Korean house, whose form was settled in the late Joseon period. Its defining parts are a post-and-beam timber frame, a roof of fired clay tiles called giwa (or rice straw thatch on humbler houses), the ondol heated floor for winter and the daecheong, a cool wood-floored hall for summer. Around these sit the yards, gates and walls that divide a household into separate buildings, such as the anchae for the family and the sarangchae for receiving guests.

Siting matters as much as construction. The principle of baesanimsu holds that the ideal house has a mountain behind it and water in front, and plans differ by climate: closed square courtyards in the cold north, more open L-shaped houses in the south. The same timber vocabulary, scaled up and painted, produced the royal shrines, palaces and temples of Seoul and Gyeongju.

Korean building is often lumped together with its neighbours, but the differences are real. The ondol floor and the habit of living close to it, the separation of a house into distinct halls, and the gentle upward curve of the eaves set it apart from the traditions covered under Japanese architecture and Chinese small-scale architecture. For the wider question of how local builders respond to climate and material, see vernacular architecture.

A short history of Korean architecture

The hanok has deep roots. According to its documented history, it grew out of Neolithic pit houses, and by the Iron Age houses already used ondol heating and giwa roof tiles. The ondol works by passing smoke from a firebox through channels under a thick masonry floor, which then radiates heat into the room; from the late Goryeo period it was used mainly by the wealthy, and mostly in rooms for the sick and the elderly.

Monumental timber building reached a high point under the Joseon dynasty. Jongmyo, the royal ancestral shrine in Seoul, was first built in 1394 when the capital moved there, burned during the Japanese invasions of 1592 to 1598, and was rebuilt in 1601. It was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1995, and the royal ancestral ritual held there each May is inscribed separately as intangible heritage, a reminder that these buildings were made for ceremony as much as for display.

The twentieth century brought the urban hanok. In Seoul's Bukchon, housing companies in the 1930s bought large plots and built groups of medium-sized hanok from standardised timber, adding glass doors to the wood-floored hall and extending eaves with metal sheet, so the type became a new kind of city housing. After the Korean War and through the apartment boom from the 1970s, many hanok were demolished.

Modern Korean architecture took shape in the same decades. Kim Chung-up returned from Le Corbusier's Paris atelier wanting to build a Korean modern architecture after the war, while Kim Swoo-geun founded the monthly SPACE in 1966 and designed the SPACE Group building (1978); colleagues described him as preoccupied with how to adapt Korean tradition to contemporary architecture.

Key principles of Korean architecture

Siting with the landscape

A hanok starts with its place: a slope behind, open ground and water ahead, the house turned to the sun. Bukchon in Seoul is described in exactly these terms, as a propitious site at the southern foot of a mountain range. Contemporary members still begin here, reading the hill, the field or the river before drawing a room.

Separate halls around open yards

A traditional household is not one block but a set of halls linked by yards and thresholds. Residents step outside to move between them, and each yard has its own character, from a working front court to a private inner garden. The winning Mnemonic entry INDEPENDENT uses this idea at the scale of a care centre, breaking its programme into small buildings around courtyards.

The roof, the eave and the timber frame

The giwa roof is heavy, so posts and beams carry it while walls only fill in. Deep eaves keep summer sun off the floor and let low winter sun in. The Home Futura entry 溫故知新 by 민지 김, Enseo Mun and hyeonchae song treats the house as a place of healing and borrows the space and design of a traditional house for it; its boards split the home into a main building and an annex in Jeonju, a city chosen in part because hanok are well preserved there.

Floors for living: ondol and maru

Heated stone floors for winter rooms and raised timber floors for the summer hall gave Koreans two climates under one roof, and a habit of sitting, eating and sleeping near the floor. Modern renovations keep this pairing. In Gyeongju, CMM Architects' 61 m² Boundary Residence keeps wooden columns and tiled rooflines from the old house and adds gently curved interior lines that steer the eye toward the garden.

Reinterpreting rather than copying

The strongest new work extracts principles instead of reproducing details. Writing about Narrative Architects' Onhyeri Jung Youngja House in Andong, our editors put it plainly:

"The house does not mimic hanok form."

UNI Editorial, on the Onhyeri Jung Youngja House by Narrative Architects

Instead it takes the courtyard, the encircling roof, the maru terrace and deep eaves from a neighbouring ancestral compound and builds them in board-formed concrete, local stone and timber screens.

Korean architecture on uni.xyz

The Korean architecture topic on uni.xyz gathers 6 member projects and 41 journals. The projects are competition entries, most of them set on Korean sites; the journals document built work by Korean studios, many of them hanok renovations, houses, cafés and libraries.

INDEPENDENT by Klaudia Druszcz and Małgorzata Rajkowska is the most liked project in this topic and a winning entry in the Mnemonic competition. It is a day care centre for 70 people with dementia in Yangsan, organised as a cluster of colour-coded buildings around courtyards, joined by covered walkways and built from local Korean pine, stone and clay. Our journal feature on the project sums up its argument:

"Instead of managing patients through restriction, this project argues that architecture itself can become the caregiver, guiding movement through color, transparency, and spatial familiarity rooted in centuries of Korean building tradition."

UNI, Independent: Hanok-Inspired Dementia Care That Prioritizes Autonomy Over Supervision

Two more Mnemonic entries take the same brief elsewhere. Green Diary House by Leila Noori and team, which received a People's Choice Award, starts from people used to a traditional way of life who feel lost in today's routines; its boards describe a central void that draws the nature of the site into the building, with a single tree standing in the court below.

Among the journals, the Onhyeri Jung Youngja House stands out. Completed in 2023 by lead architects Sihong Kim and Namin Hwang of Narrative Architects, the 172 m² courtyard house replaces a 1974 farmhouse a few steps from an ancestral house built around 1454, and reads the clan compound's ㅁ-shaped plan into concrete, stone and timber.

Renovation is the other strong thread. DRAWING WORKS kept the crooked pine beams and layered mud walls of an old farmhouse in Jecheon for the 105 m² Gorami House (2022), choosing what to preserve, renew and reinterpret. CHAWOOCHAWOO's Haksanjae Private Library and Residence in Gangneung (2024) splits the brief into a sarangchae library for 10,000 books, lit from the north and from skylights, and a separate anchae residence across a courtyard.

The tradition also reaches commercial interiors. In Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Studio GIMGEOSIL's 86 m² Old Ferry Donut Café gives the coffee bar a diamond-shaped cornerstone drawn from hanok foundation stones and uses a moving shelf partition that echoes a traditional folding screen. Student work does the same: A bowl that contains nature by jiwon kim and junghan sung, a winning entry in the Skincafe competition, proposes a skincare centre whose boards place it on Jeju, with a tea house, showrooms and a series of experience yards, one of them laid with Jeju black sand.

SEOCHEON by jaehyeon kang, an Editor's Choice in the Circle of Life 2.0 competition, takes a different source: its boards describe a charnel house designed as the Seocheon flower garden of Korean mythology, with a garden on the ground, the charnel space below and a meditation room under water.

Challenges and future directions

The first challenge is survival. Many hanok were lost to post-war rebuilding and the apartment boom, and those that remain need skilled carpenters, timber and clay that are harder to source than concrete. Renovation journals on uni.xyz show the trade-offs owners face: insulation and glazing on one side, original beams, mud walls and roof profiles on the other.

The second is avoiding pastiche. A tiled roof on a concrete box says little about Korean space. The more convincing work keeps the deeper habits: separate halls, yards that change with the seasons, careful siting and an economy of means. Seung H-Sang, Seoul's first City Architect and founder of IROJE architects & planners, has argued for exactly that restraint:

"Beauty of poverty. Here, it is more important to use than to have, to share than to add, to empty than to fill."

Seung H-Sang, Beauty of Poverty (2016), as quoted on Wikipedia

Finally, Korea's ageing population and dense cities raise questions the hanok never had to answer. Competition briefs on dementia care, family housing and memorial spaces show designers testing whether yards, thresholds and timber can serve those programmes too.

Korean architecture for students and designers

For a thesis, Korean architecture offers clear starting points: the hanok as a model for compact courtyard housing, ondol and maru as a climate strategy, the reuse of urban hanok neighbourhoods, or timber joinery as a living craft. The Nano Nest 2020 entry The collection by 종근 이 and team shows one route: it proposes indirect communication through exhibition for a family that rarely talks, and draws its plan from Korean alleyways and jogakbo patchwork.

Start with a real site and a real household, study an existing hanok in measured drawings, and test your ideas in open design competitions on uni.xyz, where several briefs have already been set in Korea.

Frequently asked questions

What is a hanok?

A hanok is a traditional Korean house built with a timber post-and-beam frame, a tiled or thatched roof, ondol floor heating and a wood-floored hall. Rooms are grouped into separate buildings around yards, and the house is sited to suit the land and seasons.

What are the main features of traditional Korean architecture?

Timber frames, heavy clay-tile roofs with curved eaves, raised stone bases, heated floors, paper-covered lattice doors, and plans made of several halls around courtyards. Siting follows baesanimsu, with a mountain behind and water in front.

How does ondol heating work?

A firebox, often the kitchen stove, sends hot smoke through channels beneath a thick stone and clay floor before it leaves through a chimney on the far wall. The floor stores the heat and warms the room from below.

Which historic Korean buildings are World Heritage Sites?

Jongmyo shrine in Seoul and Bulguksa temple with Seokguram Grotto in Gyeongju were both inscribed in 1995, and the Hahoe and Yangdong villages followed in 2010. They are good places to see palace, temple and village architecture side by side.

Who are important modern Korean architects?

Kim Chung-up and Kim Swoo-geun are recognised as two of the most significant figures in modern Korean architecture. Later figures include Seung H-Sang, whose practice IROJE continues to build across Korea.

References and further reading

• Hanok, Wikipedia
• Ondol, Wikipedia
• Jongmyo, Wikipedia
• Royal ancestral ritual in the Jongmyo shrine and its music, UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage
• Bukchon hanok village, Seoul Hanok, Seoul Metropolitan Government
• Kim Chung-up Dialogue, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea
• Kim Swoo-geun, Wikipedia
• Seung H-Sang, Wikipedia
• IROJE architects & planners, IROJE