Korean American transnational architectural histories offer vast possibilities for new scholarship on significant contributions to the built environment of the United States. Preliminary studies of the most significant movements and architects opened the doors to exciting new lines of inquiry about the architects, works, and architectural archives potentially available to fully explore Korean diasporic lives and architectural contributions under the broader rubric of AAPI architectural histories.¹ Scholarship on AAPI built environments is still dominated by studies of the cultural landscapes of Japanese and Chinese America; work on Korean American architects and designers is only just emerging, while conservation issues for practitioners and communities of the Korean diaspora in North America have scarcely been addressed.²

The relatively late large-scale immigration of Koreans to the United States has contributed to the lack of architectural histories and conservation studies of Korean American cultural landscapes. In the introduction and seventeen essays that make up Franklin Odo’s groundbreaking work, Finding a Path Forward: Asian American Pacific Islander National Historic Landmarks Theme Study, Korean Americans are discussed only as agricultural laborers, small business owners, “war brides,” and adoptees.³ The study of Korean American architects in the SAH-Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum Initiative: Rediscovering Asian American and Pacific Islander Architects and Designers was the first to focus on Korean American architects and landscape architects as significant cultural figures shaping the built environment of the United States. Building on the major advances in the Cooper Hewitt project, we argue that assembling more robust transnational archives of Korean American architects—including building documentation, interviews and the material culture of their personal and professional lives—is needed to write fully inclusive architectural histories. We argue that studying the transnational personal and professional lives of Korean American architects must be informed by emerging scholarly perspectives such as Yuan Shu’s notion of “oceanic archives” and Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s call for “transnational American Studies.”⁴

1. Gail Dubrow, Sean McPherson, and Yao-Fen You, SAH-Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum Initiative: Rediscovering Asian American and Pacific Islander Architects and Designers (New York: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2023); Gail Dubrow, Sean McPherson, and Alice Tseng, “Asian American and Pacific Islander Architectural Histories: Mapping the Field and Its Futures,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 83, no. 1 (2024): 6–28.

2. Studies of Korean American communities focus on ethnographic approaches, rather than attention to the built environment. See Shelley Sang-Hee Lee, Koreatown, Los Angeles: Immigration, Race, and the “American Dream” (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022); Katherine Yungmee Kim, Los Angeles’s Koreatown (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2011) for representative examples of this approach.

3. Franklin Odo, ed., Finding a Path Forward: Asian American Pacific Islander National Historic Landmarks Theme Study (Washington, DC: National Historic Landmarks Program, National Park Service, US Department of the Interior, 2017). In this collaborative study, note in particular Dorothy Fujita-Rony, “Reframe, Recognize and Retell: Asian Americans and National Historic Sites,” 127–39, esp. 131, 135, in which Korean agricultural laborers in the late nineteenth century and Korean garment workers in the late twentieth century are discussed for their roles in labor activism. Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, “Asian American Businesses, 1848 to 2015: Accommodation and Eclectic Innovation,” 141–58, especially notes the contributions of Korean agricultural and industrial laborers, as well as their success in small businesses in organic farming, grocery and liquor stores, nail salons, and wig shops. Rick Baldoz, “Asian Americans: The Cold War,” 225–33, on 226 discusses the influx of Koreans from the Korean War, including “war brides” and adopted children. In “New Asian American Communities: Building and Dismantling,” 307-324, Catherine Ceniza Choy discusses the role of the Korean War and the 1965 Immigration Act in stimulating successive waves of Korean immigration to the United States. In Appendix 2, “AAPI National Historic Landmarks Study List,” 388, only one property, the Willows Korean Aviation School in Willows, California, is listed for possible eligibility for National Historic Landmark designation. The only Korea-related monument on the National Register of Historic Places is the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC.

4. See Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Envisioning Transnational American Studies,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 6, no. 1 (2015), https://doi-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/10.5070/T861025807; Yuan Shu and Donald E. Pease, American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning toward the Transpacific (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2016). For two interesting case studies of transnational digital collaborations, see Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Transnational American Studies: Next Steps?,” in Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies, edited by Yuan Shu, Otto Heim, and Kendall Johnson (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019), https://doi-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/10.5790/hongkong/9789888455775.003.0011.

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