Accommodation Process and Its Meaning for Nakamura Yoshihei's Western Architectural Manners in Cooperation with Anton Martin Feller and Tatsuno Kingo

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to grasp acceptance process and its meaning for Nakamura Yosihei's western architectural styles in cooperation with Anton Martin Feller and Tatsuno Kingo, through whose vivid actions during the Korean Empire (1897-1910) and the Japanese occupation period (1910-1945). With surveys as to the stylish features of his buildings, this thesis focuses on four perspectives regarding his accommodation attitudes: First, creative eclectic approaches which support Classical Revival, subsuming the Serlian, Palladian, Hindu-Saracenic, Victorian Queen Anne, Roman/Greek, Renaissance Venetian, and Japanese styles, were instilled in his buildings, retaining the overall tautness of idioms inherited from Tatsuno Kingo, greatly impacted by Richard Norman Shaw, George Edmund Street, Josiah Conder, and William Burges; Second, he sought to design a new building style manipulating a chemical combination, and fit a given commission through the correct understanding of architectural elements(e.g. Corinthian, Tuscan Orders, etc.). He wanted to share the methods of application to construct a western building by translating Sir. William Chambers's treatise as a result; Third, Anton Martin Feller is an important architect in understanding Korean modern architecture between the late 1910s and the late 1920s because he tried to seek a new architectural style, Austrian/German Secession, which was made combining his ingenious ideas with past borrowed motifs founded on the classical historicism, as above-mentioned; Fourth, after a trip with Feller to Europe and America, Nakamura appropriated in his own buildings a Spanish Baroque(Colonial) manner with which several public auditoriums were built in California and Texas, the United States. He borrowed its whole form selectively, nonetheless still maintained eclectic and antiquarian sense through past classical elements(Gothic, Baroque, Romanesque, etc.), as well as the Secession, showing the strong influences of Shaw, Feller, Conder, Burges, and Tatsuno each. To conclude, in concert with Anton Feller, Nakamura struggled to look for, preserving past classical styles and adopting the tastes of the time, a new architectural style which provides a clear-cut pattern of associationalism between architectural form and its contents in the four points, which help decode the architectural situation of the time accordingly.