Addresses

In an obscure article entitled, "Boundary and Sense of Place in Traditional Korean Dwelling," by Rieh Sun-young (at the time an Associate Professor of architecture at the University of Seoul), I learned how address labels can tell us a lot about our connections to "space", which in turn tell us a lot about the ways we treat "place".

Sun-young tells us that while American address-labels start with the individual (micro) and proceed to building, street, city and state (macro), Korean address-labels start with the region (macro) and proceed down to the individual (micro).

Western custom, she tells us, "seems to originate from the perception of oneself... [where] the individual wants to be identified first." The Korean tradition, however, emphasizes the "collectivity" first. "The people in these cultures identify themselves through larger community groups to which they belong and orient themselves through a series of places in which they experience boundaries." We are where we come from. In order to find me you must first find my community.

Through our most casual act of addressing letters or printing business cards, American culture shows our sense of the accidentalness of space. The individual here is seen as a constant no matter where we are. We are seen as people who, at any particular moment, happen to occupy one random spot. The address is an accident of the moment. If anything, we believe, it is the individual who gives meaning to space rather than place giving meaning to the individual.

(Cell phones, by the way, uproot even this tangential connection to place. With the increasing loss of land lines and the disconnection of area code from dwelling, our phone numbers, which used to be an indicator of person with place, are merely accidental indicators of where we happened to be when we purchased our first cellular contracts.

And with our phones, we can "locate" and connect with our friends without having the slightest idea where they are. It is as if space has momentarily disappeared. Perhaps it is precisely this creeping sense of living dislodged, this growing awareness that we are becoming not just uprooted but unlanded, that is driving the urgency to "eat local" and champion urban farming.)

Korean addresses are just the opposite. They orient us within circles of place. A person cannot be known, has no enduring identity, without first being located in the boundaries, history and culture of place. It is "place" - a combination of landscape and culture - that makes the person, not the person that makes the place.

No doubt this almost thoughtless act of addressing letters sheds light on why we so blithely treat the world as we do. In some ways, we truly believe we are self-made, and our historic wholesale migration from land, county and farm over these past 100 years has led us to believe we can live unlanded.

The way we address our letters shows us that. If we even send letters anymore.