Hidden Monuments

Jeju Island’s burial culture is embedded in the island’s distinct landscape, where sandam burial mounds are not isolated monuments but quietly coexist with fields, ranches, and forests. These sites are living records of intangible heritage—ancestral beliefs, Beolcho rituals, and vernacular stone-stacking practices—manifested not through formalized memory, but through their modest yet persistent presence in the landscape. Today, however, these spaces are under threat: policies favoring cremation, rapid urbanization, and shifting land values render them increasingly invisible or obsolete. In the past few decades, two-thirds of sandam have been displaced, and with fewer than six out of over 100,000 burial sites designated as cultural heritage, traditional models of conservation are inadequate—unable to engage with the dispersed, landscape-bound nature of these burial grounds. This project reimagines Jeju’s burial mounds not as relics to be preserved, but as spatial anchors for cultural and communal expressions. Through a series of small-scale architectural interventions—gates, stages, passages, and shelters—deployed along paths tracing sandam clusters, the work explores how memory can be practiced rather than displayed. By offering ways to engage with the buried, the forgotten, and the living simultaneously, the project expands the idea of heritage: not as a static record, but as a participatory and evolving relationship between people, land, and memory.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Lee, Sesil

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• O’Brien Jr., William

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/163553

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/163553