green building in korea, informally...

The first week of our trip was very culturally focused, visits to temples and palaces, evenings with Rotary club members and host families, amazing food at every meal, and a bit of language acquisition.  It was all amazing, but seven days into the trip we had yet to visit any A/E firms or green buildings, and I think we were all wondering when the “vocational” components of the trip were going to start, at least officially. Despite this, we had already noticed a lot of things in the Seoul cityscape and the Korean mentality that reflect a lot of the sustainable design principles that we all talk about in our jobs on a daily basis. A few examples:

1.    All buildings, and I mean all of them (high rises and everything) have operable windows.  Somehow they work it out with the HVAC systems design and the BAS (and we later learned, when visiting a sustainable design consulting firm, that Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations are pretty common to show how best to implement natural ventilation strategies). There seems to be an inherent understanding that at certain times of the year, even if limited, interior comfort levels can be maintained by opening up the building envelope to the elements.

Greenspace adjacent to apt building parking

2.    There is some kind of vegetation in every spare square meter of the city… even the largest streets (four lanes in either direction) are tree-lined, and every building seems to have its own patch of green, sometimes with vegetables and sometimes with more conventional landscaping, and when there is no place in the ground to plant things, planted pots are placed on top of the ground, some along the edge of the sidewalk in the street. Green roofs seem to be pretty common as well… and this level of integration of green into the cityscape could not have been an afterthought.

3.    Of the recurring experiences we’ve had over the past 16 days, hearing the phrase, “it’s good for your health” has probably been the most frequent. Virtually every food that we have eaten, as it has been explained to us, has some kind of health benefit. Whether it’s that ginseng enhances for strength and stamina, lotus root is good for your eyes, walnuts benefit the brain, tea made from the peel of the mandarins from Jeju Island helps to prevent cancer, taking vitamin C after eating red meat reduces its impact on the heart, or that drinking vinegar (or possibly only the secret recipe version we got in Kangwhado) protects your liver from the effects of alcohol, the list goes on, I assure you.  I suppose my point is that there is some underlying health-related reason why Koreans eat most things and this focus (read, obsession) seems to make them pre-disposed to favor building practices that also have a positive impact on human health.   

Bike rack at the entrance to every subway stop

4.    There are bike racks everywhere. Simple as that.
5.   Last but not least, we’ve visited several historic buildings, all of which incorporate passive design strategies (orientation with respect to the sun, eaves on the roof for shading, placement of windows to optimize natural ventilation. They also use a traditional means of under-floor heating called Ondol (Link), which circulates air heated by a stove(often waste heat from the kitchen) underneath raised wooden floors, the air flow created by a chimney that creates a draft. We have been told that all residential buildings (new and old, single and multi-family) use more modern interpretations of this concept, in the form of radiant heating and cooling systems built into concrete floor slabs and sometimes even in the walls. This is (at least in part) why most residential furniture sits low to the ground, and why most Koreans still eat and sleep on the floor.

i have more info on the actual green building visits we've done in the past week, but that will have to wait for later.