Hanok Garden, a landscape project in South Korea by Y Design Office, strips one of the older Korean traditional courtyard houses into its barebones with a small deck for resting. The old house is simply turned into a public garden. More is taken away than what gets added. The project asks and challenges the very basic questions about a person, a house, a city and nature. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Hanok Garden is located in a small village called Gasang-li which holds about thirty families. It’s about an hour away from Daegu, a city with 2.5 million residents. The average age of the villagers is over fifty and farming is their major source of income. Urbanization is a common phenomenon all over the world and it certainly is the case in Korea as well. This brings about an easily anticipated problem in which the rural sides are having an increase in its number of abandoned houses.
Naturally, this raises a relevant issue in how these empty structures should be dealt with. Hanok Garden is a very small change and doesn’t dream to achieve grand solutions as in somehow moving thousands of people back to the rural areas. It rather thinks from a perspective in how to encourage the townspeople to stay longer. It tries to turn a place that may feel like a ghost town into a place where people may want to come and visit. It attempts to help the empty houses to feel less lonely by giving it new residents, trees.
Architect: Y Design Office Location: Gyungsangbukdo Youngchun Gasang-li, South Korea Building Type: Garden/Landscape/Reconstruction Size: 50sqm Date: 2011
