The Institutional Significance of Collective Housing in an Ethical Vacuum: Reflections and Experiments in Contemporary Korean Housing

You are cordially invited to attend the lecture by Jin Baek:

Date: 12 February 2026

Time:18:00—20:00

Venue: SDE4 Lvl 5 Forum

Registration: https://bit.ly/nusdoa_JinBaek
BOA-SIA and SIP CPD points pending

The Institutional Significance of Collective Housing in an Ethical Vacuum: Reflections and Experiments in Contemporary Korean Housing

This talk examines collective housing in contemporary Korea against an ethical vacuum produced in the process of modernization in East Asia. This condition arises from the destabilization of family-based ethics and the incomplete formation of civic ethics. Within this condition, the talk reframes the prevalence of apartment housing in Korea—often developed as large, semi-gated communities—not simply as a dominant residential form, but as a spatial configuration shaped by ethical disalignment. Against this backdrop, the talk explores how the ethical role of collective housing might be rearticulated in relation to the formation of civic ethics, in an era when family ethics no longer constitutes the dominant ethical framework of everyday life.

Drawing on Watsuji Tetsurō’s account of the interrelation between climate (fūdo) and ethics, the lecture first outlines how climatically and historically cultivated forms of family-centered ethical relations—characterized by asymmetry, obligation, and embedded care—took shape in the Korean context. Inseparably integrated with these ethical formations is a spatial preference for detached housing, marked by external aloofness and internal openness. This configuration limited the development of public space and constrained the emergence of ethics of the inter-personal beyond the family. The lecture then considers how rapid modernization disrupted these ethical and spatial structures, while shared forms of civic ethics capable of organizing collective life beyond the family have yet to be fully articulated. Within this framework, the widespread emergence of apartment housing since the 1960s is reinterpreted as a spatial expression of ethical disalignment: the contraction of family-centered ethical relations alongside the absence of civic ethics.

Lastly, the lecture explores the uncharted potential of collective housing as an institutional setting to cope with this ethical vacuum. It concludes by examining several contemporary Korean initiatives as institutional settings that explore the conditions under which forms of living together and of the inter-personal may emerge.

Jin Baek is a professor at the Department of Architecture and Architectural Engineering, Seoul National University. He acquired Bachelor of Science from Seoul National University, Master of Architecture from Yale University, and completed his Ph.D. in the history and theory of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on environmental ethics, cross-cultural issues in architecture and urbanism between modern East Asia and the West, and urbanism as an ethical and cultural condition of collective life. He is the author of Nothingness: Tadao Ando’s Christian Sacred Space (Routledge, 2009), Architecture as the Ethics of Climate (Routledge, 2016) and Justice and the City (published in Korean, Hyohyung, 2025).

His articles have been published in various architectural and philosophical journals such as the Architectural Research Quarterly, Journal of Architectural Education, Architectural Theory Review, Center, Philosophy East and West and so forth.