Yeouido Sibum Apartments: South Korea's first high-rise collective housing complex, 1970-1971

This paper investigates how the architecture of the Yeouido Sibum Apartments portrays the social, cultural, and political ideals and realities of the post-war South Korean developmental state of the 1960s-70s. Built as the tallest and most sophisticated apartment complex at the time in Seoul, the Yeouido Sibum Apartments was intended as an ideal family housing complex for the city’s emerging upper middle-class residents. Given the symbolic importance of apartment construction under Chung Hee Park’s regime, advancing a rapid modernisation of the country, the project played a propagandistic role in visualising an ideal modern city promoting Western lifestyles. In this sense, the Yeouido Sibum Apartments project is architecturally important in terms of showing how South Korea reacted to the world by designing the first high-rise model apartment complex in the post-war period.

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ISBN
978-1-944214-31-9