The story of high-rise apartment buildings

Last time I wrote about the area of Seoul without high-rise apartment buildings — the traditional, and fashionable neighborhood of Bukchon. Writing about an area with no high-rise apartments made me think about Seoul’s history of high-rise apartments.

When I first came to Korea in 1965, every neighborhood was like Bukchon. One-story hanok, and two-story “new” homes that were being built in the '60s. No five-story walk-ups — they were the next to come. No elevators, but four- and five-story apartment buildings. In New York, that kind of apartment building is called a “walk-up” — meaning no elevator!

I remember an incident in 1968, when a set of five-story walk-up apartments was being built. There was a set of those apartments — new and modern — in Mapo or Yongsan, built on the banks of the Han River. The river began to erode the banks, weakening the buildings’ foundations, and eventually they collapsed into the river. The thing I remember about that incident was the wife of the director of our program then, who commented, “Somehow these people need to learn how to live on top of each other.”

That seemed a meaningful and yet weird statement at the time. And when I think about it now, looking out over Seoul and its endless high-rise apartment complexes, Koreans certainly have learned how to “live on top of each other!”

The high-rise apartment buildings coincide with the phenomenon of urbanization. In 1965, Korea was 20 percent urban and 80 percent rural. People had a “gohyang” — a hometown. Few people in Seoul were truly from Seoul. People had roots in the countryside. I think that concept is fading in today’s Korea. Now Korea is 90 percent urban, and only 10 percent rural, and the rural areas are, sadly, dying. The closing of a village elementary school is not news. It’s sad, but it’s not news — it happens in so many places. Elementary school buildings are being “repurposed” — used for other purposes. No school children. People either move to a nearby city, or couples aren’t having children. The rural villages, once centers of life and living, are empty and dying.

In the meantime, in Seoul and other urban areas, the high-rise apartments are getting taller and taller. In the 70s, the Banpo apartments were one of the most fashionable places to live. Upscale professionals lived there. Now they have all been torn down, and new housing is being built there. I think those apartments were in the ten-story range, with elevators. One step above the five-story walk-ups.

Then in the '80s and '90s, we saw taller and taller apartment complexes — 17 stories tall, 25 stories tall. Now we see skyscrapers, 50 stories tall, as buildings for housing. Korea has a high number of “skyscrapers” — there is a definition. I looked it up — a “high-rise” is over 12 stories tall. A skyscraper is over 40. Although some are arguing for a new definition of over 70 stories to qualify as a genuine “skyscraper.”

There is a list of the rankings of skyscrapers by country. China is first with over 3,300. The U.S. is second with 900. Japan is fifth with 280, and Korea is sixth with 270. In Korea, approximately 70 percent of the buildings are for housing — that figure is hard to calculate because some buildings are a mix of office and housing.

My personal recollections, as I’ve watched Korea build taller and taller buildings, are to note that Korea seems to always be building. One friend asked me one time to name the national bird of Korea. America has its eagle. What is the national bird of Korea? Some would say the magpie — that’s correct. But my friend pointed to the construction cranes we could see at that moment — and said, “It is the crane.” (A play on words — the construction crane, not the ubiquitous white egret or crane we see all over Korea).

I’ve noticed another phenomenon as I’ve watched the taller apartment buildings: the naming of the buildings. In the early days, they all had noble-sounding, Chinese-character-based names. Names like Hyundae or Dongbang were common, and often the name of the complex was written on the walls of the building in larger-than-life Chinese characters.

Then came the time, maybe the '90s, when it became fashionable to name buildings in pure Korean wording. Like "gaenari" (forsythia), "mujigae" (rainbow), or "jindallae" (azalea).

Nowadays, the most fashionable apartments (really, condominiums) have exotic-sounding foreign names — sometimes English, but often French or Italian: Xi, Raemian, Adeliche, Acro Lucentium, Prugio. It seems so odd that a common joke these days is that the names are deliberately difficult so that the daughter-in-law will choose such a place, knowing the mother-in-law won’t be able to pronounce it and therefore won’t come to visit — the daughter-in-law’s dream scenario.

Mark Peterson (frogoutsidethewell@gmail.com) is a professor emeritus of Korean studies at Brigham Young University in Utah. The views expressed here are his own.