Yecheon Eupsamuso

This building was erected in 1932 by the Japanese colonial authorities as an office to administer sixteen dong in the area; it has served as the Yecheon Eup Office since 1937, and in 1979 a two-storey reinforced-concrete office wing was added to its rear. The Yecheon Eup Office is a two-storey red-brick building facing south, set slightly longer along the east-west axis and fronting the town's main street; it has a hipped roof and is symmetrical about the entrance porch at the centre of its façade. In plan it is a rectangle slightly longer east-west; both floors originally consisted of a single open space, but partition walls have since been added, and the ground floor is now used as a civil-service office and storeroom, and the upper floor as the eup head's office and administrative offices. The exterior walls are built of red brick on a concrete foundation, with tall vertical windows set at regular intervals; the lintels above and below the windows are all linked together to form what resembles a horizontal string course. The windows are presumed to have originally had flat-arched heads and sash panels that slid up and down, but they have since been replaced with sliding aluminium-framed windows. A distinctive feature of the building's exterior is its emphasis on frontality, verticality and ornament, seen in the semicircular arch and pediment-shaped roof of the entrance porch, the chimney, and the brickwork's horizontal bands and dentil (tooth-shaped) patterning. Inside, the floor is finished in polished artificial stone (terrazzo), the walls in paint over cement mortar, and the ceiling in plasterboard. As a government office building erected by the Japanese colonial authorities in 1932, although its windows, doors and interior finishes have since been altered, it otherwise retains its original appearance well. The building's exterior, especially the composition of its façade and its brickwork technique, also expresses the characteristics of its period and style, and since almost no buildings from the modern era survive elsewhere in the province, it is valued as precious material for the study of modern historical architecture.

AI Translation

Where it is

Region

Yecheon, Gyeongbuk

Designation

Cultural Heritage Material · 문화유산자료