NowSeoul

Architecture

Architecture in Seoul

Seoul is built on slopes with a mountain in most sightlines, and the ground is rarely flat enough to ignore. Its modern architecture spent decades working out how much of the older language to keep.

• Amorepacific Headquarters

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  Completed 2017

  David Chipperfield

  A headquarters in Yongsan built as a cube with its middle removed. David Chipperfield cut a void through the volume and set a garden inside it, so daylight reaches the centre of a very deep plan. Aluminium fins wrap every elevation and hold one texture across the whole mass. It takes a corporate type and gives it the restraint usually reserved for civic buildings.

• Ewha Womans University ECC

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  Completed 2008

  Dominique Perrault

  A campus building at Ewha that reads as landscape rather than as a building. Dominique Perrault cut a valley through the hillside and lined both walls with glass, putting classrooms, a library and a cinema below grade. The roof is a lawn, so the mass disappears and the architecture becomes the cut. Daylight falls the full depth of the slot, which is the whole idea.

• Leeum Museum of Art

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  Completed 2004

  Mario Botta · Jean Nouvel · Rem Koolhaas

  Three museum buildings on one Hannam-dong slope, one architect each. Mario Botta built a brick cone for traditional art, Jean Nouvel a rusted steel and glass box for modern work, Rem Koolhaas a dark volume for temporary shows. Each chose a different material and a different idea of how art should be met. Botta, Nouvel and Koolhaas answered the same brief on the same site, and the answers stand within a few steps of each other.

• Space Group Building

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  Completed 1971

  Kim Swoo-geun

  A small brick building in Wonseo-dong, once Kim Swoo-geun's office and now a museum. He split it into half levels joined by short flights of stairs, so the interior unfolds as a sequence of low, dim rooms instead of floors. The brick is dark and the openings are small, which makes the scale feel domestic. It is where Korean modern architecture found a language of its own rather than an imported one.

• Gyeongbokgung

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  Founded 1395

  Joseon court

  The main palace of the Joseon court, on the axis that still organises central Seoul. The plan sets the throne hall on a raised stone terrace with the mountain behind it treated as part of the composition rather than a backdrop. Colour, bracket sets and roof lines follow rank rather than taste. It burned in the invasions, was rebuilt in the 1860s, taken apart under colonial rule and rebuilt again, so the palace is also a record of Korea deciding each time to have it.