Designing contemporary hanok inspired by 'madangjip'

From the street level, the building looks like one of many cafes in the city with glass walls on three sides. Perhaps its pillars hint at an unusual structure.

It is only once more of the building comes into view as you approach it, that you are struck by its unique appearance. Jinkwansa Korean Cultural Experience Center is a contemporary hanok building located at the entrance of Jinkwansa, a Buddhist temple nestled in the foot of Bukhansan. Its traditional tiled roof and wooden lattice windows with hanji, or traditional mulberry paper, sit alongside glass, concrete and steel.

Initially, some people were hesitant to accept the building when it was completed in 2021. “In the past we frequently heard that it looked awkward, like someone wearing a Western suit and a traditional Korean hat,” says Cho Jung-goo, founder and architect of guga Urban Architecture, as we enter the building through an entrance to the side of the cafe. “But people who said those things were people who had a definite idea of what hanok should be,” he adds. The building won the top prize at the 2024 Korea Architecture Awards organized by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport.

We start the tour of the building at the basement where a multipurpose hall, a cool, dark, cavernous space lined with marble tiles, is located. Both the pink marble on the floor and the grey marble on the walls come from Jeongseon, Gangwon Province.

The hall feels isolated, contained on its own, a stark contrast to the first-floor cafe.

The second floor is the life of the building. Called “gongyanggan,” referring to a kitchen in a Buddhist temple, the space is used to demonstrate and teach temple food cooking for which Jinkwansa is famous. It also doubles as a large banquet space.

Here, curtain wall was used on the exterior with wooden lattice folding doors with hanji on the inside. From the outside, it looks as if the entire second floor sits in a glass jewelry box. Inside, wooden pillars and beams create a warm hanok atmosphere, while hiding the curtain wall's steel beams from view. The folding doors open to reveal a panoramic view of the greenery through glass.

Many elements typical of hanok are on display on the third floor. The “madang,” or court yard, in the middle, occupies a central place, and you can see the tiled roofs and the eaves. The meditation room is perhaps the most hanok-like space in the building. The room is slightly elevated from the floor, just as a hanok is built elevated from the ground. Other traditional hanok elements include the ceiling beams and rafters, and the many sliding windows that invite nature into the room

The center is one of the many buildings in Jinkwansa that have been designed by Cho. Just a minute or two up the street, another building is under construction. “I’ve done 70 to 80 percent of all the new buildings at Jinkwansa,” Cho said.

Near the Buddhist temple complex is Eunpyeong Hanok Village, a Seoul City-led initiative to build a hanok neighborhood.

“We’ve done about three houses there,” Cho said. One of them is Nakrakheon (2016), which also combines the traditional with the contemporary. For this 1 1/2 story house, the architect employed thin concrete columns, using the space created below as a parking space.

“At the time, I thought a two-story hanok would be unfamiliar and so I settled on floating half of the house,” he said.

“The client said he had never lived in a house and was very worried,” Cho recalled. His brief was a house that was not uncomfortable and a dining room with a view of the large zelkova tree. “So, I proceeded to design a contemporary hanok,” Cho said.

Nakrakhyeon has space for parking, modern living space on the lower floor and traditional hanok features on the upper floor. The dining room, as requested, has a fantastic view of the zelkova tree.

Cho’s designs for contemporary hanok have evolved over time: the third house in Eunpyeong Hanok Village, named “Susukkotjae,” is a two-story hanok.

His two-story contemporary hanok designs for commercial buildings include a bakery and a cafe in Sejong City -- Manna Mill (2021) with red brick facade, and Hemel (2019), respectively.

Cho’s continued experimentation with contemporary hanok that mix modern and traditional materials as well as designs is based on his exploration of the urban scape in Seoul.

Dubbed “Wednesday exploration,” Cho and his colleagues have been exploring Seoul on foot every Wednesday since Nov. 29, 2000.

He had just opened his own practice on Nov. 11, after returning to Seoul from Tokyo University where he had been enrolled in a Ph.D. program. Since he had no clients to keep him in the office, he headed out.

“We started at Jongmyo and the exploration has since spread from that point to the surrounding neighborhood,” he said, adding, “We started in the historic city center and continue to explore.”

At the moment, he makes daily visits to a hill in Hannam-dong marked for urban redevelopment, conducting a field survey of all the buildings in the area. “I mean to archive buildings that I consider important,” he said.

Cho’s confidence in designing different types of contemporary hanok stems from nearly 25 years of surveying Seoul on foot.

“The madang in this building is unique. Madang is an important theme in my architecture and the concept of ‘madangjip’ (house with madang) was discovered through my field work during which I saw many small houses with madang be they Western style or hanok,” Cho said.

For a hanok in Cheonyeon-dong, Cho built an atrium in the madang so that the large family could use the space as a living room and use daecheong, or living room space, as a kitchen-dining area. “That was inspired by a house in Seocheon I saw on a survey trip. The madang was covered overhead and used as a living space, leaving a bit of it uncovered so that you still had madang,” he said.

“It seems I learn much from nameless architecture,” he said.

Many clients also ask for a house that is like hanok. “They like hanok but don’t have the confidence to live in one, they say,” said Cho. After all, there are many preconceived ideas about living in a hanok — that it is cold and drafty, that it is inconvenient — of which some are true and some are not.

Cho meets such requests by designing contemporary hanok with what he deems the two essential elements of hanok — madang and eaves — and rooms that have a hanok atmosphere.

“I think life with madang is the very essence of hanok. Living with madang in the center, whether it be outside the house or inside the house, living a life connected to that madang is the essence of hanok,” Cho said.

“If I could add one more, it would be eaves. It is difficult to form a connection between the outside and the inside without an eave,” he said.

“Let’s say it’s raining. I could have coffee (outside) sitting under an eave. But if there is no eave, I would have to take the coffee inside,” he said.

Madang is not simply an outdoor space, Cho said, but a piece of nature.

“It’s like taming a ferocious wolf into a dog, reducing the wild nature a little by putting up a low wall around it,” he said.

“My goal isn’t necessarily to just build hanok. Maybe a foreigner would visit a house and say, ‘The atmosphere here is really good. Something about it feels Korean,’” even though the architecture is contemporary, he mused.

“Maybe they would ask who built such a house, and discover that it was by Cho Jung-goo.”

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Renewed interest in hanok, or traditional Korean houses, is palpable today, demonstrated by the growing number of hanok cultural facilities, cafes, accommodations and homes. While some new hanok architecture espouses the traditional form dating from the Joseon era, hanok buildings that have been adapted to contemporary conditions and lifestyles are also gaining ground. In this series, entitled “Evolving Hanok,” The Korea Herald explores how hanok continue to evolve to stay relevant to current milieus. — Ed.