SPACE Academia OPEN CALL 02
SPACE launched its first international open call for papers in February 2025, followed by a second call in September 2025. The theme of the second call, ‘Korean Housing and Architectural Discourse: A Cross-Cultural Diagnosis and the Quest for Alternatives’, was proposed by Sung Hong Kim, one of Chief Editors of SPACE Academia, with the aim of drawing attention to ‘Korean housing’ — a subject that has long been relegated to the margins of architectural discourse. Submissions were accepted until February 2026, followed by preliminary and final review. The review focused on how concretely, rigorously and provocatively each paper addressed Korea’s polarized housing landscape within an architectural framework, resulting in the selection of two winning papers. The two winning entries will be introduced across issues 706 and 707.
Abstract
This study reframes the crisis in Seoul’s low-rise residential areas as due not to aging, density, or underdevelopment, but as a failure of spatial relations marked by the erosion of building–street interface space. Comparing Nonhyeon-dong and Nakameguro through comparable density, plot, and street conditions, it identifies how exterior-wall placement, parking, and landscaping rules form a regulatory grammar of interface space. It focuses on ground-level frontage between the street boundary and building envelope. The “thick boundary,” an analytical framework for its interpretation, denotes not physical width but relational depth produced by overlapping transitional elements and everyday functions. The study combines regulatory comparison, fieldwork, plan-and-section documentation and spatial readings of five cases per area, using frontage diversity and boundary layering as indicators. In Tokyo, road slant-plane restrictions, exterior-wall setbacks, the separation of building approval from vehicle-storage requirements, street-frontage greening, and the recognition of narrow planting strips enable landscaping, access, and everyday functions to overlap and mediate building–street relations. In Seoul, mandatory on-site parking, the absence of small-plot landscaping standards, and weakened street–exterior wall coordination tend to reduce interface space to parking, maintenance, and residual surfaces. Beyond the binary of redevelopment and the status quo, repeated regulatory and design adjustments to small frontages can restore public streets to everyday settings and enable interface space to function as social infrastructure sustaining micro-publicness.
See the full text of this paper in the attached file.