School Days, Part I: Yonsei and Ewha

For the Flickr slideshow, click here.

Yonsei University and Ewha Womans University are two of Korea’s finest institutions of higher learning and symbols of the spiritual, social and educational contributions made by Christian missionaries in Korea. The campuses are also home to some wonderful historic architecture, some of which we’ll look at this in this post.

Yonsei University

One of Korea’s top three universities, Yonsei’s storied history dates back to 1885… sorta… making it the oldest college in Korea. Yonsei University Medical School and Severance Hospital trace their lineage back to Korea’s first modern hospital, the Gwanghyewon, founded by American Presbyterian missionary, doctor and diplomat Horace Allen. The rest of the school traces its lineage to Chosun Christian College, founded in 1915 by Allen’s fellow missionary, Horace Grant Underwood, who was dispatched to Korea — interestingly enough — by historic Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn.

Chosun Christian College became Yonhi College in 1917, but the Japanese colonial era proved a difficult time for mission schools, particularly in the late 1930s, when deteriorating relations between Japan and the United States put American missionary-run schools in a tough spot. In 1944, the Japanese Government-General, labeling Yonhi College enemy property, took over the school and turned into an engineering school to support the war effort, while Severance Medical School was renamed Asahi Medical School in 1942.

After Liberation, the school was restored as Yonhi College and reopened in 1946; in the same year, it was promoted to a university. When North Korean troops occupied Seoul during the Korean War, they used the campus as a headquarters; as a result, the campus suffered serious damage when UN forces retook the city. In 1957, Yonhi University and Severance Medical College merged to form Yonsei University, the school we all know and love today.

As you all know, the school has Korea’s most reputable Korean language school.

H.G. Underwood Statue

A short walk from Yonsei’s front gate you takes you to the old campus at the heart of the university — you’ll know it from the courtyard surrounded by three handsome ivy-colored buildings. Very collegiate.

In the middle, however, is the H.G. Underwood Statue, which was Seoul’s first statue when it was first erected in 1928. Professors at the school launched the project in 1926 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the death of Horace Grant Underwood, who passed away in New Jersey in 1916. Some 25 groups and 343 individuals contributed money to raise the statue.

The poor statue, however, would have a tough time. In 1942, the Japanese — needing the bronze for the war effort — took down the statue, replacing it with a marble memorial praising the Pacific War. After the war, a second H.G. Underwood statue — crafted by sculptor Yun Hyo-jung — was erected, but three years later, during the Korean War, leftists pulled the statue down with rope ala Saddam. After the war, Yun was asked to craft a third statue, which he did in 1955. This is the one that stands today.

Stimson Hall

WARNING: If you don’t like Tudor Gothic architecture — or, more specifically, it’s American transformation into Collegiate Gothic — stop reading NOW, because the stone edifices, Tudor arches, oriel windows and Gothic spires are going to be coming fast and furious.

The Stimson Hall, on the west side of the courtyard, is the oldest of the three buildings, having been completed in 1920. Designed by architect Henry Killiam Murphy with construction supervised by E.H. Miller, a professor in the chemistry department, it’s a charming Gothic-style structure with the obligatory arched doorway, bay windows and ivy.

Murphy and Miller were responsible for the Appenzeller and Underwood Halls as well.

Appenzeller Hall

Named after H.G. Appenzeller, the Methodist missionary who founded Pai Chai Hakdang and Chungdong First Methodist Church, the Appenzeller Hall was completed in 1924.

Underwood Hall

The most prominent of the old stone buildings in the old courtyard is the Underwood Hall, which was completed in 1925.

Tudor arch… check. Oriel windows… check. Crenelation… check. Yep, it’s Collegiate Gothic.

Henry Killiam Murphy: So, who was the H.K. Murphy character? Connecticut-born and Yale-educated architect H.K. Murphy (1877—1954) might not be particularly well known in his homeland, but he is well respected in China, where he served as an architectural advisor to Chiang Kai-shek. Murphy worked in China from 1928 to 1935, doing a substantial amount of work in Nanjing, where Chiang hired him to build a modern capital for the nation.

Collegiate Gothic: You’ll notice that Yonsei, Ewha and (as we shall see later) Korea universities were built in Tudor Gothic style, known in its American university form as Collegiate Gothic. This should come as no surprise, as Collegiate Gothic was all the rage on US university campuses — from Wikipedia:

In the USA, James Gamble Rodgers’ reconstruction of the campus of Yale University and Charles Donagh Maginnis’s early buildings at Boston College helped establish the prevalence of Collegiate Gothic architecture on American university campuses. Charles Klauder’s Gothic revival skyscraper on the University of Pittsburgh’s campus, the Cathedral of Learning, for example, used very Gothic stylings both inside and out, while using modern technologies to make the building taller. Ralph Adams Cram became a leading force in American Gothic, with his most ambitious project the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York (claimed to be the largest Cathedral in the world), as well as Collegiate Gothic buildings at Princeton University. Cram said “the style hewn out and perfected by our ancestors [has] become ours by uncontested inheritance.” In addition to Princeton University, Lehigh University and Boston College, some of the buildings on West Chester University’s campus are also built in the Collegiate Gothic style. Also, Atlanta’s historic Oglethorpe University continues to build in the Collegiate Gothic style to this day.

Early practitioners of this style, such as Ralph Adams Cram (mentioned above), believed that by channeling English Gothic styles — and those of Oxford and Cambridge in particular — America’s centers of higher learning could assert their academic legitimacy by identifying with the English roots of American liberal education. From Princeton University: An Interactive Campus History:

In December 1902, for example, six months after being elected as President of Princeton, Woodrow Wilson commented in the Princeton Alumni Weekly that “Gothic architecture has added a thousand years to the history of the university, and has pointed every man’s imagination to the earliest traditions of learning in the English-speaking race.” Wilson also once said that in constructing Collegiate Gothic buildings, Princeton had “declared and acknowledged [its] derivation and lineage.”

Ralph Adams Cram, the Yale-trained architect who would become the “high priest” of Collegiate Gothic as Princeton’s supervising architect in the 1910s and 1920s, was even more explicit. “By building [in the Collegiate Gothic style],” he wrote, “Princeton was committed to the retention for all time of that collegiate style of architecture which alone is absolutely expressive of the civilization we hold in common with England and the ideals of liberal education now firmly fixed at Princeton.”

By so consciously copying Oxbridge models in stone and mortar, Princeton, as an educational institution, was asserting its academic legitimacy and status. Princeton’s quadrangles were powerful visual statements that the University considered itself on a par with the oldest centers of learning in England.

Not only is there a distinctive “return to our English roots” aspect to this all, but also (at least for some practitioners) a rejection of Renaissance values — from Wikipedia:

As an author, lecturer, and architect, Cram propounded the view that the Renaissance had been, at least in part, an unfortunate detour for western culture. Cram argued that authentic development could come only by returning to Gothic sources for inspiration, as his “Collegiate Gothic” architecture did, with considerable success.

And in the 1920s and 1930s, this architectural form — with its historical and philosophical legacy — found its way to Korea. Small world.

Hmm… cranberries.

Pinson Hall

The Pinson Hall was built in 1922 as a student dormitory. It’s most famous for being where Korean poet Yun Dong-ju resided when he was a student here from 1938 to 1941.

Underwood Memorial Hall

Well, this doesn’t look very Korean now, does it?

The very American-looking home (with its very American front lawn), now used as the Underwood Memorial Hall, was built in 1927 by Horace Horton Underwood, the son of H.G. Underwood, as the family residence. It used to be a two-story home, but the second floor collapsed when the campus was bombarded by UN artillery in the battle to liberate Seoul.

The Underwood family lived in the home until 1976, when the second and third generation Underwoods donated the home and its land to the university, asking that it be used as a museum. According to this story, however, the university neglected the building until 2003, when it tried to remove it to make way for new construction, prompting the third-generation Underwood, Horace Grant Underwood to protest to the university chancellor. It was then that work began to restore the home for use as museum dedicated to the history and contributions of the Underwood family.

On a more tragic note, the home was where Ethel Underwood, the wife of H.H. Underwood, was murdered by communists in 1949.

Yonsei University has a history of the Underwood family; the Chosun Ilbo, too, ran a story on the family in 2004.

UPDATE: Just some corrections — Although the house was donated to Yonsei in ’75 (or ’76), H.G. Underwood continued to live there until the early 1980s. And since the 2nd generation of the family was limited to H.H. Underwood, who died in 1951, only the third generation of Underwoods were around at the time of the donation. Moreover, it’s uncertain whether the house actually came under threat in 2003, but other historic homes on the campus were under threat at the time, leading students to protest their planned destruction.

Ewha Womans University

Ewha Womans University, the world’s largest female educational institution, has a history just as proud as Yonsei’s.

Founded in 1886 by American Methodist Episcopal missionary Mary F. Scranton, the school began as Ewha Hak Dang, now the site of Ewha Girls High School in Jeong-dong. The name, incidentally, means “Pear Blossom Academy,” and was bestowed upon the school by none other than King Gojong.

College courses were added to Ewha Hak Dang’s curriculum in 1910, and professional courses added in 1925. In 1935, the school moved to its current campus in Sinchon, not far from Yonsei University. Finally, in 1946, it was promoted to a full-fledged university.

Before you give me grief about the spelling of the name, I direct you to Wikipedia:

While there may seem to be two grammatical errors in the name, “womans” was the correct English spelling in the late nineteenth century when the university was founded (as opposed to women’s). The absence of the apostrophe is an error which the institution has kept for historical reasons.

Needless to say, Ewha produced many of Korea’s female “firsts,” including its first female PhD, its first female lawyer, its first female Constitutional Court justice and its first female prime minister.

Main Hall (Pfeiffer Hall)

The Main Hall of Ewha Womans University, also known as Pfeiffer Hall, is arguably the most beautiful academic building in Korea.

Built in 1935, it’s pretty much everything you’d expect in a Collegiate Gothic building. It was designed by W.M. Vories & Company Architects Ichiryusha, a Japan-based architectural firm founded by William Merrell Vories (1880—1964), a very interesting character who is, or should say was, living proof that even English teachers can make something of their lives. The Kansas-born Vories went to Japan in 1905 as an English teacher/missionary, settling as a teacher in Ōmihachiman, Shiga Prefecture (which seems to have a ton of Western-style architecture). Something of an amateur architect, he was asked to inspect the YMCA building in Kyoto in 1908, and so started for him a profitable career in architecture. Together with an American architect he brought to Japan, Lester Chapin, he founded W.M. Vories & Company Architects Ichiryusha, which is still around today. In 1917, he married the daughter of Viscount Suenori Hitotsuyanagi, and in 1941 — yes, 1941 — he became a naturalized Japanese citizen.

Now THAT’s dedication to your adopted home.

The actual construction of the building was run by a Chinese mason, with site supervision handled by architect Kang Yun, a Korean employee of W.M. Vories & Company Architects Ichiryusha.

Ada Prayer Chamber

On the third floor of Pfeiffer Hall is an old, small prayer room — it’s a hidden gem. Between the tracery windows, old wooden pews, tiny altar and wonderful Gothic ceiling, it just doesn’t get any better than this. It might only be one-kan wide, but this was the most impressive Protestant place of worship I’ve visited in Korea.

Well, the water well looked old.

Ewha Campus Center (ECC)

As you know, I hold a lot of modern architecture in open contempt. In fact, I blame it for most of the ills of the world, from poverty in Bolivia to genocide in Darfur. Still, Ewha’s EEC, designed by French architect Dominique Perrault and completed just this year, doesn’t completely suck. In fact, it’s downright nice, and an interesting use of space.

More Old Buildings

Just a couple of other old buildings on campus — the old gym/dance hall from 1935 (top) and the graduate school annex from 1936 (bottom).