Housing Abroad: Asia

Traditional Asian Housing

Traditionally, housing has been a symbol of familial, religious, or socioeconomic status in Asia. In the past, most Asian countries had a strict socio-economic hierarchy that generally affected a number of housing elements, such as location, forms, materials, sizes, and even colors. Clear segregations in using those elements for socioeconomically different houses have also been noted. For instance, even though the number of socioeconomic levels varied depending on dynasty era, there were four socioeconomic classes in Korea during the Joseon Dynasty, which existed between 1392 and 1910. In Korean culture, the most effective element in determining the best house was location. Houses built according to the principles of feng shui were always occupied by higher class citizens called yang-ban, which means the highly educated, scholarly class. Feng shui suggests a low hill on the backside and a little stream in front of a house for natural ventilation, with a beautiful roof scape and an adjacent natural environment (i.e., curvilinear rooflines harmonizing with trees and low mountains), and the flow of exterior and interior spaces (i.e., functional space planning in accordance with space users). House size for higher level citizens was sometimes more than 90 times larger than that for lower level citizens. Housing materials, forms, and structures also differed depending on household socioeconomic characteristics.

Houses in Japan and China showed similar characteristics. They symbolized the socioeconomic levels of their occupants, even though the geographic characteristics of each country were different. Interior and exterior finishes, housing structure, and heating and cooling systems varied according to the countries’ respective geographic characteristics, but the fact that housing shows an owner's socioeconomic status was obviously the same in these three countries. Existing houses built many centuries ago exhibit these characteristics.

Nonetheless, in such traditional socioeconomic segregation in housing, there was a common rule in building houses. Location, materials, and all the other elements of a house were nature oriented and environmentally friendly. Builders tried to minimize the negative impact of housing construction on preexisting natural environments. They preserved plants, trees, streams, hills, and mountains. They used regional and natural materials. For instance, woods produced in local areas where houses were built were articulated by skilled carpenters and used for housing frames (i.e., columns, beams, door, and window frames). Dried mud with the appearance [Page 313]of stucco was applied to waterproof exterior walls, baked bricks called ki-wa were used for roofs, and multiple layered sheets of paper were used for windows. Dried straw was used for roofs of lower level houses in Korea, but these materials were commonly used for the middle and lower class houses in Japan. Japanese houses in particular used mixed materials with straw and wood chips for interior flooring, which was called tadami. In Korea and China, the flooring materials were different from each other. Dried and baked mud was the chief material used for the interior flooring of Chinese houses, which used nonfloor heating systems. Korea, on the other hand, used similar materials for floors but had floor heating systems called on-dol for each bedroom. The use of regional materials might be caused by limited access to diverse materials due to underdeveloped transportation systems at the time. Efforts to respect natural environments and minimize development impact should be highlighted. The exercise of similar principles may be found in the organic architecture espoused and practiced by the American 20th-century architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

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