The power of architecture is often easy to overlook. While SNU students spend hours on campus every day, the physical environment fades into the background, going unnoticed because it is a constant presence. Yet the spaces we traverse are never merely backdrops; they subtly guide our behavior. A quiet trail encourages a contemplative walk, an open lobby facilitates conversation, and a well-equipped studio inspires creation. Our environments shape our experiences, our habits, and even our sense of identity.

What is notable is how students of different majors experience entirely different physical worlds. Situated in diverse settings by department, and because the campus encompasses over 200 buildings, most students frequent only a few spaces within their own discipline. A sociology student may graduate without ever visiting the engineering complex at the campus summit.

These distinctions are not arbitrary. A department’s building is designed with a specific vision of its community, effectively serving as a blueprint for the ideal student it seeks to cultivate. There are larger seminar rooms where collaboration is expected and more laboratories where research is prioritized. Students, in turn, absorb the expectations embedded in the architecture.

How these priorities are interpreted and even resisted in everyday life complicates this picture. Before turning to those lived interpretations, however, we must first closely examine how physical space itself projects student identity.

The Blueprint of Identity

The SK Business Building (#58), housing SNU’s College of Business Administration, was constructed in 1990 through a donation from SK Group. Aiming to “nurture sound business leaders,” the building embodies the spirit of management in its design. “I feel I talk more when I’m in this building,” said Jang, a senior business student. “There are many open areas to sit casually. I naturally bump into friends and ask how they’re doing. It’s also easy to spot people, like when you look down into the lobby from the second floor.” Visibility becomes a cultural trait here as the architecture promotes openness and networking.

According to the 2021 reconstruction design notes, the lobby is intended to be a plaza for rest, inspiration, and active exchange. Its glass façade connects the interior with the outside garden, and an open staircase creates an atrium by extending this central space to the second floor. Group seminar rooms on the upper floors, designed for team meetings, reinforce the narrative of collaboration and self-projection.

As such, connection is not just possible. It is expected. Within this ideal image projected onto the architecture, business students gradually develop a self-perception distinct from students of other majors. This becomes clearer when contrasted with the College of Humanities, where an entirely different image is expressed. The 2010 redesign of the College of Humanities emphasized a visual manifestation of “SNU-ness and humanities-ness,” a place “where the old and new coexist, literature and arts permeate, and wandering is encouraged.” The harmony of low buildings and natural spaces with benches and paths reflects modesty over ostentatious display. While business students are led to value confident presentation, the humanities space encourages students to identify as those who steadily contemplate and philosophize.

When Life Moves In

In fact, SNU’s buildings propose an ideal mode of being before one even steps inside. Nonetheless, it is the students who turn the intentions into lived practice, sometimes affirming them and sometimes bending them to their needs.

This dynamic is hard to miss in the buildings of the College of Fine Arts, numbered from #50 to #52. Built in 1975 by the architect Kim Swoo-geun, the design was inspired by his belief in the naturalistic power of traditional Korean architecture, implementing a central courtyard to evoke the relaxed atmosphere of a hanok. Low-rise brick buildings form an irregular arrangement around the courtyard, and their dark red brick walls lend the exterior a striking sense of dignity.

What breaks that quiet solemnity, however, is the evidence of daily craft. Near the courtyard, unfinished sculptures are strewn about. This trend continues inside, where the scattered easels, props, and half-finished works draw one’s attention. In Building #50, dozens of paintings are piled up next to the entrance, and splashes of white paint cover the floor. Disorder is everywhere, but it feels more inspiring than messy.

This liveliness, contrasted with the dignified architectural tradition, is intensified by the bustle of students themselves. Some emerge from studios in aprons, brushes in hand, and rush to the small art-supply store. Others walk in and out of the exhibition space in Building #52 and snap photographs of their work. Within the studios, amidst the flurry of sketching and assembling, students transform the physical space into a mosaic of distinct identities. Each area is personalized to the artist. As sculpture student Ryu shared, “Our seats don’t need labels…You can just tell whose space is whose.”

The College of Fine Arts evidently honors artistic heritage through its hanok. However, it is the traces of everyday creation that give it its modern authenticity and vitality, ultimately defining it as a space where students transcend tradition to explore their inner worlds.

Between Aspiration and Reality

Elsewhere on SNU’s campus, architectural intent aligns with a more traditional conception of the model academic student. The 1st Engineering Building (#301) serves as a prime example, embodying ideals of high achievement and an unwavering pride in one’s work.

The cutting-edge look of the building’s 15-story glass façade evokes awe at first sight. Its rooftop marks the highest point on campus at 258 meters above sea level, roughly matching one’s field of vision from the highest floor of Building 63. It enables students to have a sweeping view of the entire campus and even Namsan Tower on clear days, inviting them to aspire to stand just as tall in their own field of study.

The interior features a multi-level atrium with open corridors overlooking a central hall, topped by a long, arched glass ceiling. It also houses unique areas like Pahk’s Creative Space, opened in 2021 to inspire students to “challenge the global market and contribute to the national economy through entrepreneurship and cooperative technological development.” It aims to assist students preparing to start businesses by providing areas for 3D printing, manufacturing, and lab work. Together, the building’s form and function read as a symbolic projection of what it means to aim high as an engineering student.

But with the architectural reflection of lofty aspirations, students do not simply feel proud to belong; they begin to perceive these physical cues as a push to work harder. After all, achievement is not a promise but something that accumulates through steady effort. Students, therefore, spend more time in study lounges and rows of partitioned desks than in high-tech collaborative rooms. Open tables and couches are often filled with those independently coding and calculating.

Here, the grand image of ambition is not entirely rejected but reinterpreted. Rather than rising to match the visual grandeur of their surroundings, students work quietly beneath it, grounding aspiration in sustained individual effort. This pattern holds true even in the aforementioned SK Business Building, where many recognize that collaborative work is supplemental but cannot substitute for individual persistence. As such, the central lobby—envisioned as a networking hub—just as often becomes a space for independent grind. Though the seminar rooms were designed for energetic group sessions, they are also used for quiet study alongside friends during exam season. All across campus, students renegotiate ideals in favor of struggles that are not glamorous but necessary.

The Final Shapers of Identity

At SNU, students often feel pushed toward a predefined idea of who they should be. Our buildings contribute to this pressure by rendering institutional expectations architecturally visible. When a department building is well-suited for networking or serious reflection, that design implies that students should excel at such actions to truly belong. A dignified exterior may inspire pride in being part of a prestigious institution, but in doing so, it presses students to live up to that prestige.

Even so, these physical structures do not determine student life in full. The substance of campus culture lies in the dynamic interactions between students and their environment. While design influences behavior, buildings are rarely inhabited exactly as intended. Students adapt spaces to their own needs and routines, and through this process, departmental identity emerges in its lived form.

Identity, then, is both inherited and continually reworked—first imagined and imposed, then reshaped through daily use. Buildings may propose fixed ways of living, but life within them unfolds individually and unevenly. A department’s character is not uniformly assigned by an exterior force, but assembled from a patchwork of distinct visions and self-perceptions.

In this sense, students become the final shapers of their own identities. This agency, however, is not automatic. It requires looking beyond what the campus prescribes and choosing how to engage with SNU’s environment. Through these deliberate acts of inhabitation, buildings come alive; and it is through such use that both space and student identity come into being.