The Law of Conservation of Activities in Domestic Space

Until the early twentieth century, for hundreds of years, the housing prototype in Seoul has been a courtyard house where a central open space is surrounded by building blocks and fence. Through the twentieth century, as new modern types of houses emerged, the housing culture began to change and consequently this prototype began to make transformations. This evolutionary process necessarily accompanied the functional change of room activities; some rooms acquired more activities and some lost them; and some has lost all the activities and became extinct. This paper attempts to analyse the housing evolution in Seoul by measuring the ″space-activity interactions″. Through the analysis, it is found that, at the collective level, the basic home activities are preserved through the formal change of the house. Without leaving the domestic field, they are decomposed into separate elements, re-distributed into other spaces, and then re-combined to characterise a new type of space. This is the internal spatial mechanism by which the old house is gradually transformed into a new house.