"Scratch Tile: Frank Lloyd Wright's Material Influence on East Asian Modern Architecture" by Nathaniel Talbot Kornegay and Suk Ji-hoon / Courtesy of Giwa House Press

Staring at walls has never been so captivating, with the release of "Scratch Tile: Frank Lloyd Wright's Material Influence on East Asian Modern Architecture" by American researcher Nate Kornegay and Korean historian Suk Ji-hoon.

What started as a relatively straightforward inquiry into legendary U.S. architect Frank Lloyd Wright's possible connection to Korean buildings led the two down a nine-year rabbit hole that resulted in this massive book roughly the size and weight of a brick and decorated accordingly on the front cover.

Unglazed scratch tiles can be found on the former main administration building of Keijo Imperial University, now Seoul National University, in northeastern Seoul's Daehangno area. / Courtesy of Nate Kornegay

While the cover introduces those who come across this tome to the look and texture of the titular scratch tiles, it doesn't quite prepare the reader for what's inside — it's basically a picture book containing 478 images collected from modern buildings, most still standing, that have been meticulously photographed, captioned and indexed.

"What I'm still continually surprised by is the commonality of these scratch tile-related textures," Kornegay told The Korea Times. "You start to see examples everywhere once you know what to look for. Not only can you find them in every major East Asian city but also in virtually every American town that had a building boom between the 1920s–1940s. Rough-textured materials took on a life of their own, moving beyond geography, culture, society and politics."

The pictures are from around the world, including the United States, Japan and its wartime colonies, mainly Korea and Taiwan.

"I had to physically visit many of the buildings in person to confirm whether or not they used some kind of scratch tile or scratch tile derivative," Kornegay said. Even in the U.S., every architectural example included in the book needed to be photographed in order to verify the kind of textured brick or tile on each building. The travel involved in all of this, while certainly fun, was a big challenge, and there are many places we still haven't visited that probably have scratch tile-related architecture."

The architecture of these buildings alone is remarkable, but Kornegay and Suk fixate on one feature in this 528-page book: the scratch tile.

"It's just where the research took us," Kornegay said concerning the focus of the book. "What started as a simple question regarding how Frank Lloyd Wright might be connected to buildings in Korea led to a long journey centered around scratch tile, its origins in the United States and its evolution in East Asia."

This textured brick material originating in the state of Ohio in the 1910s arrived in Asia in 1919, with the construction of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Scratch tiles, which were produced locally at Japanese brickworks, soon spread to the Korean Peninsula, at the time a colony of Japan. Many important building constructed here in the 1920s and 1930s was built with this type of brick. The material continued being used even after the war, and appeared in some traditional Korean houses known as hanok built in Seoul in the 1960s.

The former Seoul branch offie building of Hazama Gumi construction company, built in 1926 in Seoul's Yongsan area, is decorated with scratch tiles. Courtesy of Nate Kornegay

Included are a handful of buildings that should be familiar to some Korea-based readers, such as the former main admin building of Keijo Imperial University, now Seoul National University, the North Chungcheong Provincial Office in Cheongju and Chungjeong Apartment in Seoul, but most of the buildings documented are even more obscure, but still fascinating to study.

The book includes several photos of hanok that exemplify the material, some of which were contributed by urban explorer Ryan Berkebile, who photographed the houses in redevelopment zones before they were destroyed permanently.

"There had been almost no serious research on the subject done before, so we had to figure out so many things," Suk said. "The sheer amount of buildings built using this particular material is one thing, and the amount of efforts to produce these tiles locally [in Japan, Korea, etc.] was another discovery that we made through research."

The Busan Meteorological Observatory, built in 1934, shows glazed scratch tiles. Courtesy of Nate Kornegay

The vast majority of buildings explored in this book, at least the ones in Korea, were built during the 1910–45 Japanese occupation of Korea. As Suk noted, architecture representing this era is often met with animosity in Korea, with Japanese-style homes of the time being called "jeok-san ga-ok," an abbreviated phrase meaning "enemy house" in English.

"Dismissing these buildings merely as 'leftovers' of Japanese imperialism is just not the proper way of thinking about the legacies of these buildings in modern East Asia — and Korea," Suk said. "As we tried to argue early in the book, it is really a fascinating case of an international cultural, architectural [and] design movement that has spread over time by a variety of driving factors, and 'Japanese imperialism' has little to no role in this, in my opinion. By talking about the multifaceted origins of scratch tile, we were trying to argue that the 'modernity' as we know today in modern Korea is not necessarily originated from a single source [in essence, Japan] but rather a combination of several factors, situated diversely in the international, socio-cultural contexts."

Kornegay agreed with Suk, saying that calling the scratch tile a symbol of Japanese imperialism wouldn't fully represent what is now known about the tile's origin and subsequent history.

"Its texture originated in the United States and evolved alongside many varieties of architectural finishing materials across East Asia. Scratch tile's history is perhaps more emblematic of both the way and the speed that architectural ideas were able to globally spread even 100 years ago," he said.

"I think the draw is in the story, the way it reminds us that there is significance in the mundane and how it focuses on the ripple effects of the stone cast into the pond rather than the stone itself. There is value in understanding why the built environment around us looks the way that it does."

This book is either the definitive work on scratch tiles, or it will lead to much further study.

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