Hongik University Seoul Campus

According to the Oxford Dictionary – or the Cambridge for that matter – a campus is “the buildings of a university or college and the land around them.” In the typical image that illustrates this definition the “land around them” is often a generous stretch of green land and the buildings a collection of politely distanced architectural objects. That is the case in Oxford. And Cambridge. And also for many campuses in Korea. The Hongik Seoul Campus, however, is different. Built in the 1950s on the slopes of the Wau Mountain in Seoul, it has been rapidly saturated with buildings, reaching the limits of expansion. “The land around them” hardly exists today. It has become “the land between them.”