The Centralization of Seoul National University by Campus Planning, 1946-1975

국립서울대학교의 종합화와 캠퍼스 계획론의 도입, 1946-1975

To create a new nation and society, Seoul National University(SNU) was established by combining former Kyungsung Imperial University with ten public colleges in 1946 under the United States Army Military Government in Korea. However, the SNU failed to successfully carry out the reform because the human resource and the space of the former system remained unchanged. After the Korean War, the 'Minnesota Project', an American education aid has led SNU to be rebuilt and turned into an American-oriented education system. The SNU Centralization Plan was promoted to complete this transformation. This plan required a specific spatial format called the campus, which emerged from the American cultural background. Under the U.S. influence over South Korea during the Cold War, several planners made proposals to create an American-style campus. The first campus plan in 1958 was proposed by Yoon Chang-sup, an architecture professor at SNU, who has studied abroad in the U.S. His initial plan to pursue the well-organized outer space with proper scale, which was influenced by post-WWII urban planning strategy, was not accepted by the realistic conditions of SNU and the perspectives of local architects. But his ideas were eventually implemented during a final campus plan proposed by an American planner DPUA in 1971. The final plan was developed with the idea of the locality elements of Korea. SNU's campus planning process was an important event that established the foundation of modern Korean university space as it began to organize outer space rather than to use just building. This suggested modern Korean universities a new view that life in outer space is as important as the life in the classroom.