Colonial Korea, revealedArchitecture and its echoes provide glimpses into 20th-century epoch October 4, 2013 | Popular Photo c. 1925, courtesy of the Hyung Il Pai CollectionDuring colonial times, the Great Southern Gate commonly appeared in Japanese tourist guidebooks as a symbol of old Korea. By Corydon Ireland, Harvard Staff Writer South Korea has the worlds 15th largest economy. The capital, Seoul, is a sprawling high-rise megacity of 10 million. From the air, Seouls Gangnam District alone with its glittering verticals of glass and steel stitched with superhighways looks like the pinnacle of modernity.Yet South Koreas architecture is little studied outside its own borders. When scholars ponder the built environment of East Asia, they still do so through the lens of Japan.A recent conference at Harvards Graduate School of Design (GSD) provided a corrective gesture. “(Un)Building Colonial Space in Korea, 1910-1945” was the first conference at a North American architecture school for scholars exploring the intersection of Korean architecture and history. The session asked: What can cultural uses of space, landscape, and the built environment teach us about the past?The interdisciplinary gathering explored new ways of seeing architecture, beginning with South Korea, through the lenses of history, literature, archaeology, and other disciplines that touch on spatial dimensions. It was sponsored by the Korea Institute, with help from AsiaGSD, the Harvard Korea Society, and KoreaGSD.“In the context of art and architecture school, you dont touch on Korea at all,” said conference organizer Melany Sun-Min Park, a candidate for a masters degree in design studies. “The modern tradition of architecture from the West went to Japan first. So when we study East Asian architecture we learn Japanese modernism, but it stops there.”Park was educated in New Zealand and Singapore before coming to Harvard, and in every place Japan has been the focus, without much attention paid to most of the fiercely modern cities known as the “Asian Tigers.” Park hopes to be “part of the first generation” to bring Korean architectural history to the English-speaking world.Helping her with the conference were two Harvard faculty advisors, Yukio Lippit, an art historian of Japan and Harris K. Weston Associate Professor of the Humanities, and Timothy Hyde, associate professor of architecture at the GSD.The conference on Sept. 27 jammed a first-floor lecture room in Gund Hall. The big crowd might be traced to the emphasis that Park chose for her four invited guest lecturers, namely the 19101945 colonial era, during which Japans imperial ambitions cloaked historical Korea in an overlay of modernism. In those years, Tokyo was the metropole of East Asia, the Oz-like mother city for the region, and a place that was believed to express spatial and cultural modernity at its best.In many cases, Korean travelers to Japan looked back at their own country and by and large felt like hicks. Issues of urbanism and space in Korean architecture provide insight to “ways in which Korean history unfolds,” said Lippit of the conference. “Its exciting.”One of the lecturers, Hyung Il Pai, Ph.D. 89, used a circa-1925 image of a 14th-century gate in Seoul to illustrate how traditional architectural features were co-opted by the Japanese to redefine Korea as part of its modernized colonial sphere.Namdaemun (the Great Southern Gate) is a wood-and-stone structure topped with a pagoda-style roof. During colonial times, it commonly appeared in Japanese tourist guidebooks as a symbol of old Korea. The gate offered a “standardized image of the colony,” Pai wrote to Park. The conquered territory was reimagined by the Japanese as “a pristine, empty and unpolluted destination ripe for exploration, adventure, and colonization.”The four speakers were scholars of literature, the visual arts, and intellectual history. They were not practicing architects, a reflection of the conferences attempt to see Koreas built environment through textual and visual records of the colonial experience, a time in history that “people can still understand,” said Park.Pai, a cultural historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, led with a lecture on photographic records of famous places, like Namdaemun, and how they became part of the “tourist imaginary” in colonial Korea. The dramatic old gate “shows off a standard postcard convention,” she told Park, “a well-maintained architectural faade” set off by clean streets, grand buildings, and busy railways.Cornell professor Ellie Choi, Ph.D. 09, a scholar of modern Korean culture, used literature as her window into the colonial era, calling fiction, poetry, and travel accounts “the best excavation site for everyday practices of the colonized.” Central to her inquiry was the fiction of Yi Kwangsu, the author of Koreas first modern novel, “The Heartless” (1917), and a Japan-educated in