Jang Hee Lee + Seonwoo Kim

Current real estate policies in South Korea remain trapped in a defunct myth: supply is too low, demand is too high. Yet, with the national housing supply rate exceeding 102%, why does the housing crisis persist? The market-equilibrium model, which sees housing solely as a commodity, cannot address this deadlock. As Engels already diagnosed in The Housing Question 150 years ago, the problem is not the lack of housing, but its distribution and political intent.

Introduced to the Korean Peninsula roughly a century ago as an alien architectural type, the apartment (APT) has become the dominant and most desirable form of dwelling. However, architects are often, if not completely, excluded from discussions about them. This is not only because government and private enterprise utilise the APT as a tool for social control and capital accumulation, but also because architects ourselves have tended to abandon the APT as a project. Overwhelmed by its scale, repetition, and genericness, we have too often accepted the APT as a neutral or purely technical solution. In doing so, we rarely question the historical, social, political, economic, and ideological contexts that have shaped the current form of APT and, more crucially, its latent emancipatory potential.

The aim of Unit 2 is twofold: first, as a seminar, we revisit the typology of the Korean APT from the Japanese colonial period to current redevelopment competitions; second, as a design workshop, we use this typology to propose new forms of collective living.

The seminar challenges the idea that the APT is an inevitable outcome of modern necessity. Instead, we will read the APT as a document and agent of specific social property relations between state, capital, and labour by addressing following questions:

• Why and how did apartments first emerge during the early years of Japanese colonial rule, and why were they named APT?

• In what ways did the APT contribute to the separation of living from working, leaving only ‘living’ within the domestic realm?

• How are social unrests and new town developments interconnected?

• Why did high-rise, steel-frame APT proliferate so rapidly after the 1997 IMF financial crisis?

• And ultimately, what would the new APT, or communal block, look like?

The design workshop explores forms of collective living by working with, not against, the existing APT structure. Participants will select, document, and analyse specific APT complexes, using the typical plan and structural grid as a foundation for radical intervention. Projects will imagine the APT both for living and working, maximise collective and shared spaces, and minimise private spaces. Previously neglected “serving spaces”—corridors, staircases, balconies, parking structures, pilotis—will be reclaimed as primary architectural spaces. While maintaining, or even reinforcing, the architectural qualities of the existing APT, we will imagine new programmes such as kitchen less houses, residential hotels, dormitories, artist studios, and other forms of collective housing. Particular attention will be paid to the ground floor as a mediator between building, complex, and city. Ultimately, this communalised prototype will be replicated to densify the urban fabric of the complex, moving beyond the logic of property to establish an infrastructure of mutual care.