The Korean Hanok: Exploring Traditional Architecture's Environmental Principles

Vernacular architecture often utilizes locally sourced materials and construction practices honed over centuries. This approach raises questions about its potential relevance for contemporary design challenges. The prevalence of high-rise developments globally, often relying on sealed envelopes and mechanical climate control, contrasts with historical architectural practices. Traditionally, regional architectures emerged from local communities, fostering distinct cultural identities and integrating passive systems for ventilation, cooling, and heating, often utilizing natural elements. The Hanok, traditional Korean houses, serve as a case study. Beyond their current role in tourism, they are also an example of how vernacular knowledge can provide passive climate-response strategies that align with the current principles of creating environmentally friendly buildings.

The project for Abby Kortrijk extends and transforms the historically significant complex of Groeninge Abbey into an arts space for site-specific temporary exhibitions and public events. Abby Kortrijk is a new kind of museum: a place for everyone, open and versatile, an urban living space in the wonderful setting of Begijnhof Park in the centre of Kortrijk.

Residing in good company, situated as it is in close proximity to a cluster of other Luigi Rosselli Architects designed homes, and built in the late 1930s, internally this house holds a number of desirable Art Deco features; externally, however, its original façade was an austere pastiche of Scotland sur Med. Located on a hilltop, the home commands eagle's nest views of both the city and Sydney Harbour, but the trade-off for such blessed vistas is the steep sloping site the house is built on; an aspect that sadly became too difficult for the previous owner – a wine merchant and widower – who moved out in favour of somewhere with fewer stairs and gentler gradients.

The project is nestled within expansive woodlands in Chongzhou, Sichuan Province. This secluded retreat is disconnected from urban contexts, accessible solely through a single forest path. The architects have conceived the complex through an abstract settlement approach, where three distinct architectural scales - monumental pitched roofs, mid-scale geometric volumes, and clusters of compact functional units - are unified through an implicit structural logic.