Describing a building - the han-ok

  I’d like to tell you about the han ok, the traditional Korean house.

There are still many to be seen around the country, and they have some very interesting features. The most noticeable is their sturdiness, they have an air of strength and durability about them. This is because they are built using natural materials like stone, earth and timber. Most are painted white and have dark tiled roofs. They are environmentally friendly in more ways than one. For instance, many have a system of underfloor heating called ondol for warmth in winter, but the earth walls and tiled roofs also allow coolness in summer, and they also had an adjustable part of the roof called the cheoma, which could control the amount of sunlight that entered the house. The size and shape of the houses differ according to social class and region. Obviously, the richer you were the bigger your house was. In the south, the han ok is usually shaped like the letter gyeut, or an English L; but in the north they are shaped like a box to keep the colder northern winds out. Some people still like to build their houses this way, but they are expensive because these days they are labour intensive. Many are kept open as kinds of museums where the public can go and visit to see what it would have been like to live in a house like this. They still even have their traditional furnishings, which makes the visit even more realistic. I think a particularly interesting feature of the houses is that the posts holding the roof are not placed into the ground, but are fixed to corner stones for flexibility in earthquakes.