• Journal of the Korean Home Economics Association
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• v.44 no.8
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• pp.181-198
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• 2006

The purpose of this study is to understand modernization process of korean housing during the past one century. To following up the changes of everyday lives of common peoples, magazines, news papers, tourist's records and gossip items were collected and interpreted from the microscopic point of view. In this study arguments on 'modernity' of korean housing was focused on some issues, thus, separation, differentiation, individualization, as well as privatization. Concrete discourses are; firstly, spatial isolation of housing and urban place each other, secondly, functional division of inner spaces of housing, and lastly, guarantee of privacy sphere. Historical changes of housing showed some meaningful phenomena. Before modernization housing was place of reproduction and consume at the same time. However after modern urban space came into existence and work and rest were separated, housing gained only mono function. Thus, housing have only one meaning as private place for nuclear family, that is "Home, Sweet Home." Instead of past multi-functional rooms, functional prescribed rooms, for example, dinning room, were newly born. In the past, the boundary between public and private sphere was not clear. For examples, everyday experiences of family were extended to the street and in the house in most cases spaces were shared. But after modernization the scale of individual spaces become larger and private life can be secured. Consequently, history of everyday life from traditional agricultural society to industrialized modern society demonstrates the structural context between the micro and macro dimension in the fields of human life. In other words, everyday lives and macro history response each other and create new perception of time-space structure in the modern housing.