The images of ordinary people’s lives that I saw from the TV dramas were indeed very unfamiliar.  Their lives were certainly different from mine.  As long I can remember, I always lived in an apartment and the next-door friend and the friend living a building away from me all lived in the same structured apartments.  Thus the TV dramas with a Korean traditional house where there was front lawn and their facet in the middle of the lawn and adding to that another family living in the other room were unfamiliar scene to me. 

As I got older I didn’t have a chance to see this kind of a house.

I think the structure of traditional Korean house is different from the one I could see in the country side.

The traditional Korean houses that were ignored under the developmental boom are resurfacing as their functions and scientific nature is reinterpreted.  All over the country the villages of Traditional Korean House are built with fervor.  Moreover, regardless of the willingness of the house owner of the village, those areas are made into tourist sites and are commercially developed.

One of those commercialized villages is in Bukchon and I was able to visit a traditional Korean house that I saw in old TV dramas.  I could see the effective division of small spaces and narrow allies that led to the houses that were built even up in the steep hillside.

The shape of a house that represents the phases of the time speaks for the thinking and the national sentiment of the age.

While visiting Bukchon, I had a lot of opportunities to talk to people living the same era as I did but lived in the traditional Korean houses.  I was curious about sentiments of the people who grew up in a place where it is open but appropriately occlusive and where many things can be communicated at the same time providing an independent space. 

I couldn’t experience it, but could I feel it by just wearing it for a while? Like the old glasses?