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From the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, Korean society underwent a fundamental change. Politically, the end of the military dictatorship allowed democratic systems to take root, bringing to a close the developmental period that had been controlled by military regimes for close to thirty years. Instead of an export-oriented growth policy, economic priority was now given to a balanced distribution of economic gains. No longer could the demands of the middle class, which had begun to share wealth and power in the 1990s, be repressed. Socially, as the pressure from population growth came virtually to a halt, administrators no longer sought ways to develop new urban spaces, shifting focus to discovering innovative methods for renovating existing areas and rehabilitating the urban ecology destroyed in the postwar development. The harbingers of economic globalization , moreover, were beginning to be felt. The demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War had marked the advent of a new world order aligned toward Western financial centers. Accordingly, Korean society scrambled for a new formula to preserve stability and ensure growth. From this standpoint, the period from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s can be considered a transitional epoch. Korean society had achieved a fair level of modernization by this time.1 Yet, as seems always the case, whenever a historical era is recognized and labeled as such, the trajectory has already shifted. In the mid1990s , the full force of globalization arrived, and Korean society, together with the rest of the world, is still experiencing its repercussions. Nowadays, all economic and cultural zones of Korean society have been integrated into global systems. As a result, the theme of globalization has come to dominate architectural and urban discourse . This is a huge change, for globalization radically redefines the modernization process. Faced with these challenges, Korean architects addressed the tasks of critically examining the achievements of the twentieth century and formulating a new discourse to accommodate a newly emerging world order. Reality in Architecture Modern Korean architecture followed its own distinctive path in the twentieth century. The differences between its trajectory and the path followed by modern architecture in the West can mostly be attributed to Korea’s belated modernization.2 Indeed, recognition of a temporal lag of almost one hundred years is crucial for understanding modern Korean architecture and the entire modernization process. That is to say, Korea’s modernization can be defined as the realization of a discursive system imported from the West. This process could not resemble the way Western modernization began and ran its course. In the West, a certain set of sociopolitical circumstances ran into severe difficulties , producing a succession of events that changed not only the political order but the built environment as well. Following the Industrial Revolution, radical social change heralded the emergence of a new architecture , and the developing tenets of modern architecture directly reflected, as well as challenged, the social context that gave it birth. The resulting discourse was the product of intellectual efforts to transform those challenges into intelligible solutions. When, decades later, this discursive system was transferred to Korea, it already included within it hegemonic relationships built on Western power and dominance. As a discursive system, its primary function, to use Foucault’s terminology, was not to communicate information but to enforce a social order by categorizing, organizing, structuring, and coding the world. However, since the most appropriate architectural ideas were imported to Korea in a piecemeal fashion according to need, the discursive system they belonged to began to be seen as transcendental. Many Korean architects attempted to alter their social reality to match this ideal model and looked at modernization as a process of realizing Western values. Accordingly, Korean architects experienced a period of so-called orientalism—a pattern wherein Koreans, searching for established principles Discovering Reality Chapter 8 112 Architecture and Urbanism in Modern Korea to define their own identity, filtered their perceptions through a preestablished, and in this case Western, lens. This meant that Korean architects lost the common ground on which they stood. For example, Chung-Up Kim’s Samilro building and Jong-Soung Kimm’s Hyosung building were both modeled on Mies van der Rohe’s glass skyscrapers, but the frame of reference for each project was not the same. The Samilro building was constructed using materials and methods imported from Japan, whereas the Hyosung building relied on Korean construction technologies and materials. The two projects reflected entirely different socioeconomic situations. So attempts to find...

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