Abstract
Forty years after the very first apartments were built in Korea in the early 1960s, the Korean construction industry witnessed the construction of high-rise residential buildings of over 50 storeys in 2002. eventually leading to even higher residential buildings of over 300 meters in 2011. For structural performance, such high-rise residential buildings come in the form of towers, as opposed to the flat, plate-like forms of the conventional apartments that have been built in Korea for nearly half a century. Because of this dramatic change in the building form, one can expect the spatial layout of the inner spaces have changed accordingly. By comparatively analyzing the layouts of unit plans of high-rise residential buildings between Korea and America, we were able to find dramatic changes in the planning principles of Korean projects, where early projects adopted planning principles of the previous plate-like apartments, in comparison to the later projects that more or less resemble the American projects. To objectively determine whether a unit plan resembles another or not, we used quantitative methods that utilize Space Syntax and statistical analysis such as ANOVA.
