Making Meaning: Translating Traditional Korean Pattern Through Digital Fabrication

Abstract

This thesis examines how patterns derived from Korean architectural references can be translated through contemporary fabrication without losing the relationships that make them spatially and culturally meaningful. Rather than treating pattern as a detachable surface effect, the research understands it as an architectural condition that mediates boundary, light, visibility, enclosure, and material presence through density, continuity, edge condition, thickness, and relief.

Beginning from the observation that pattern changes when the conditions of making change, the thesis asks not whether a historical artefact can be reproduced exactly, but whether culturally grounded patterned relationships can remain legible through contemporary making. Through fieldwork in South Korea, pattern redrawing, and comparative prototyping across laser cutting, CNC milling, 3D printing, and mould-based casting, the research tests what survives translation, what transforms, and which design decisions preserve patterned coherence.

The work evaluates these translations through criteria including density, edge clarity, continuity, relief, assembly logic, and threshold performance, considering both spatial effect and cultural continuity. The findings suggest that meaning does not depend on exact replication, but on whether key relationships among geometry, material, making, assembly, and spatial effect remain coherent through adaptation. The thesis therefore frames translation as a design responsibility and craft as a form of situated judgement exercised through both digital and material processes of making.