SPACE September 2026 (No. 706)
A view of the Zone 2, ‘Wells of Hanyang’. Behind it lies the site of the house known as The Large House in the Village. ©Kim Jeyeon
Insa Historic Site Museum
Permanent exhibition
Next to an office building at the entrance to one of Insa-dong’s alleyways, a soft glow rising from below ground catches the eye. Looking down, an unexpected landscape appears amid the city: rows of cuboid stone blocks set on an uneven earthen floor. This is the Insa Historic Site Museum, which opened in July. Built directly on a buried cultural heritage site and now Korea’s largest urban archaeological site museum, it peels back the layers of time to reveal the sixteenth-century city once more.
Entering the exhibition space, visitors first encounter a communal well from the early Joseon period set beneath a glass floor. The sight of visitors huddled together above the cylindrical well, measuring 1.6m in diameter and 4.9m deep, evokes the public space around which people once gathered and shared in as part of everyday life. From the well, the visitor deck continues like an alleyway, finished in open grating to create the sensation of walking directly above the archaeological remains. Along the deck, the remains of six buildings from the backstreets of Jongno, drainage channels, and an old road are revealed in sequence. Even the site’s gentle slope has been preserved, allowing visitors to experience the remains not as a series of fragmented sites but as part of a single urban fabric.
The exhibition is broadly divided into six thematic zones. Zones 1 to 3 begin with an overview of the Insa-dong
archaeological site before leading visitors past the communal well and through the backstreets of Jongno, offering something akin to a walk through the city. Zone 3.5 serves as a transitional space, after which Zones 4 and 5 turn their attention to individual finds, including Hangeul metal movable type and the Ilseong Jeongsiui, an astronomical timekeeping instrument. Zone 6 is a lounge that also functions as a hands-on experience space.
The largest portion of the museum is occupied by the remains of six houses extending across Zones 3 and 4. For each building site, the original plot, floor plan, sections and elevations were inferred through a comparative examination of ...
