The purpose of this study is to critically investigate the ways in which scholars and architects in Korea have theorised the tradition in Korean architecture from the early 20th century to the present. After opening the door to foreign powers, the most important issue to be resolved in Korea architecture has been the modernization of the traditional architecture. The successful modernization of Korean traditional architecture depends on successful theorization of the tradition. However, many attempts to theorise the uniqueness of tradition in Korean architecture had not been instrumental to the modernization of Korean traditional architecture. The reason why they were not successful lies in the lack of philosophical and methodological reflection upon how to approach the tradition. They were either trapped in ambiguous essentialism without systematic methods and theories, or simply inventing the tradition from the vantage point of the present. This paper argues that in order to theorise the tradition, one need to translate the tradition into contemporary architectural vocabularies. What is important in translating the tradition is not to directly apply contemporary concepts and perceptual frame of architecture to traditional architecture but to find the gaps and differences between the two. This will open hermeneutic spaces to translate the tradition into useful principles and vocabularies of comtemporary architecture.