• Journal of the Architectural Institute of Korea Planning & Design
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• v.34 no.9
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• pp.117-128
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• 2018

The United States understood the fostering of pro-U.S. elites in "free world" countries as an important Cold War weapon. From 1954 to 1962, the U.S provided considerable assistance to Seoul National University (SNU) for its postwar rehabilitation and future development in terms of repair and construction of campus buildings, equipment and book purchases, and faculty exchanges. With the aid of this educational assistance project widely known as the Minnesota Project, SNU was reborn with an academic orientation to the U.S., separating itself from the Japanese education that was its origin. This study argues that the Minnesota Project played an important role in crafting SNU's architecture program and the exchange program's recipients as key "knowledge brokers." For individual trainees, experience in the U.S., as opposed to a backwards situation in their homeland, had allowed them to recognize the U.S. as an ideal source of knowledge. Since the Minnesota Project, SNU's Architectural Engineering Department was filled with faculty members who had trained or studied in the U.S., which became a significant distinction of SNU's architecture program in sharp contrast to its counterparts at Hanyang University and Hongik University where most of the faculty members studied in Japan during the Japanese colonial period. As many graduates of SNU had been appointed as faculty members in newly-founded architecture programs in South Korea, a hierarchical diffusion path had emerged in architectural education that led from SNU to other school's architecture programs, with the U.S. at the apex. The legacy of the Minnesota Project extended over the next few decades, in which studying architecture in the U.S. was recognized as a shortcut to success in the field.