This study empirically examines the transitional phase of Korean urban and architectural transformation from the 1970s to the 2000s through the work of Lim Chung-Eui, a first-generation Korean architectural photographer. The aim of the study is to rep...
This study empirically examines the transitional phase of Korean urban and architectural transformation from the 1970s to the 2000s through the work of Lim Chung-Eui, a first-generation Korean architectural photographer. The aim of the study is to reposition his photographs not as mere visual representations, but as primary historical sources that contemporaneously observed and recorded moments in which urban formation and disintegration intersected, and to clarify their methodological potential for interpreting urban and architectural history.
Methodologically, this study selects photographs from Lim’s extensive archive that reveal changes in urban structure and classifies them into three categories: Urban Development and New Construction, Demolished Architecture and Residential Areas, and Traditional Architecture. The analysis proceeds in three steps: (1) organizing photographs according to shooting period, location, and subject in relation to urban policies and historical event timelines; (2) applying a three-layered analytical framework of case, context, and interpretation; and (3) examining the conditions of photographic production in Chapter 4 by distinguishing between institutional commissions and autonomous, non-commissioned photographic practices as independent recording strata. Particular attention is given to how judgmental factors—such as the delineation of recording scope, viewpoint selection, choice of construction phase, and repetition over time—expand the interpretive capacity of photographs. Comparative analysis with photographs of the same subjects produced by other photographic agents further highlights the distinctive recording strategies evident in Lim’s work.
The analysis reveals that Lim’s photographs present architecture not as a finished product but as a processual entity encompassing construction, completion, use, and demolition, thereby visualizing the temporal and material dimensions of urban change that are often absent from textual records and architectural drawings. The combined use of ground-level and aerial viewpoints, the interplay between close-up and distant perspectives, and repeated documentation of the same sites vividly illuminate structural transformations produced by state-led development and demolition, including the development of Yeouido and Gangnam, peripheral redevelopment areas, and the demolition of the former Government-General Building and Foreigners’ Apartments. Notably, the long-term coexistence of commissioned photography and autonomous documentation rooted in the photographer’s own critical awareness expanded the range of recording choices, giving rise to what this study defines as a transitional vision—a mode of seeing architecture as both a symptom of historical change and a medium through which memory accumulates during periods when development and disintegration overlap. In this context, the architectural memoryconstructed by Lim’s photographs does not simply reproduce past scenes, but functions as visual evidence that enables later generations to trace how the social and material meanings of architecture were formed, transformed, and erased over time.
The significance of this study lies in supplementing architect-centered narratives in existing architectural and urban historiography by repositioning architectural photography as a primary source capable of empirically reconstructing processes of urban transformation. By focusing on the conditions and judgments that shape photographic production, this research interprets architectural photography as an active recording practice rather than a passive outcome image. Ultimately, by conceptualizing Lim Chung-Eui’s architectural photographs as a visualization of architectural memory, this study proposes a new analytical framework through which urban and architectural change can be historically interpreted through photography.