It is true that apartment houses, a typical type of urban housing in the nation, are effective enough to have contributed to solving the housing shortage problem during the compressed growth of the past half century. However, apartment complexes, monotonous and prosaic in appearance, provides cause for dreary environment of urban housing. Exclusive plans for apartment complexes, isolated from the urban context, result in a range of social problems. Accordingly, in order to restore the functions of urban housing and improve settlement environment, it is desperately needed to bring change into the design of apartment houses.
However, entering the 1970's, in order to address the increasingly deepening housing shortage problem in urban areas, the government legislated the Housing Construction Promotion Act, laying the legal ground to provide mass housing for urban centers, and implemented the District Plan for Apartment Buildings, based on which to develop large-scale housing complexes. In such apartment complexes, the pattern in the block distribution was set according to the criteria for building distance
and housing construction under the Building Act.
Reflecting on this pattern of urban housing development, since the late 1990's, alternative models for urban housing development have been explored. However, because of institutional rigidness as a fundamental constraint, the change in apartment building design is basically limited. The situation is such that in recent years, attempts for new types of housing are being made by introducing the Special
Construction District, which gives legal exemptions to certain areas. This ironically demonstrates the limitations in diversifying apartment building designs under the current legal system.
The standardized design for apartment houses at present results from the supply-oriented housing policy the government pursued for a long period of time without an 'image' for urban housing to pursue, which is aimed to secure settlement environment for the people. The current legal system cannot be free from this context. Therefore, what is required now is to set the 'image' of housing aimed to restore the functions of urban housing, and explore how to improve the legal system towards the realization of this vision.

keyword : apartment houses, urban housing, design diversification, improvement of regulation, shape restrictions, performance restrictions