Grandpa's Cool House | Busan, South Korea | 2017

Architects: architect-k
Client: Withheld
General Contractor: Chae Heon Construction
Photographers: Joonhwan Yoon

The Grandpa's Cool House is a retirement home for the baby boomers. In Korean modern history, baby boomers (From year 1953 ~ 1962) are the generations who experienced the situation of the extremes in life.

They have undergone a period of boom in economic development in the postwar period of poverty, opened democracy against the military dictatorship, grew up in the local Korean culture and Confucian values, but in the flow of globalization, they live in the age of capitalist mass culture and global values. 

The baby boomer generation is a multi-layered generation that exists through all the whirlpools of modern Korean history.

How can the identity of these baby boomers be expressed? What is local Korean architecture?

In the course of modernization and industrialization, traditional or native Korean architecture has largely disappeared, but it still exists as one of the mainstays of Korean architecture.

In addition, the newly introduced western architecture of the last half century has also become a big trend in the Korean architecture with the changing lifestyle of Korea. However, these two are strictly independent architecture and exist only on both sides of Korean architecture.

What if the local Korean architecture meets Western architecture and goes through a process of natural evolution?

The words 'the generation of baby boomer' called the intergenerational generation, and 'Korean native architecture' resemble many in those respect.

Based on this background, The Grandpa's Cool House is a project with the theme of 'Finding the identity of a baby boomer generation' and 'Taking the modernization process of Korean native architecture.'

We organized spaces in a way that adds modern functionality and aesthetics while maintaining the layout and meaning of traditional architecture that conforms to nature.

Traditional architecture toenmaru(Korea style terrace) and cheoma(Korean style eaves) were made into a modern and natural space by using the corrugated steel sheet made of metal, and bamboo that grows naturally in Gimhae.