Abstract
Before Korean apartments were standardized and produced in mass quantities to form today's idle cityscape, there were store-apartments, a mixed-use building type with commercial facilities on the lower floors topped by residences on the upper levels, which were built for specific locations in dense urban environments. This research focuses on Myeongsudae Apartment, a largely neglected example from the mid-1970s located in Hukseok-dong, Seoul, characterized by vertical and horizontal articulations of its seemingly arbitrary massing, and the complexity of its inner circulation. The core argument of this research is that such features were not a result of the architect's conscious form-making effort, but an outcome of what we can call "situational rationality", a fragmentary but logical approach that responds to its complex given conditions, including irregular urban patterns of neighboring roads and markets, and programmatic needs of its inner spaces. Through such method, the building fulfills its diverse functional requirements and procures an external representation of such complexity, ultimately merging with its irregular, small-scaled urban context, in terms of both formal appearance and internal organization.