The Truss and the Cave: Architecture, Industrial Expertise, and Scientific Knowledge in Postwar Korea, 1953-1974

Abstract

This dissertation is a history of Korean architecture that defined its emergence as a modern discipline and practice through exchanges and collaborations with scientists, engineers, and traditional carpenters. Between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, the postwar experts modernized Korea’s built environment—from large-scale industries to ancient archaeological discoveries—and in this process reckoned with the competing priorities of a developmental state: cultural production and techno-scientific progress, historic preservation and modern industrialization, national expertise and imported knowledge. In contrast to previous scholarship that has interpreted modern Korean architecture as an exclusively cultural mode of production, I argue that Korea’s architectural discipline was enlisted as a state resource to catalyze and register its developmental imperatives of kwahak kisul (science-technology). In the absence of commercially manufactured building materials and technologies, state-led projects, such as the construction of the Ch'ungju Fertilizer Plant and the restoration of the Sŏkkuram cave-temple, became crucial sites for negotiating the terms of technical, design, and industrial expertise. Meanwhile, the representation of culturally authentic construction techniques and artifacts became an equally urgent impetus for the Korean state seeking to canonize its built patrimony. The dissertation concludes with a study of the emerging interest in architectural historiography and empirical research that peaked into the early 1970s, a dual preoccupation that challenged the primacy of the colonial archaeological sciences in driving the content and method of Korea’s architectural history. The aim, overall, is to interrogate the contingent yet parallel developments in scientific epistemology, industrial development, and heritage management, which inaugurated the intellectual foundation and professional expertise of postwar Korean architects seeking to recreate the status quo of both the past and the present.