Seoul Architecture: Modernity Gaining Momentum
A few weeks ago, I was able to travel to Seoul — a place I have wanted to visit for a while. Given my background in architectural design, I naturally gravitated towards elements of the city’s built environment. It goes without saying that during my short holiday, I would not be able to begin scraping the surface of such a vast and complex topic — but I want to share the ways in which I was inspired by the city’s contemporary architecture. After visiting a handful of places such as a cultural centre, a resort, and a library, which I will be discussing later — a line of questioning begins: In the 21st century, how do we spatially represent culture — Entertainment? Learning? Community Experiences?
The Dongdaemun Design Plaza, pictured above, is a cultural hub and jaw-dropping futuristic edifice where curves hug voids. When I exited the subway station, I remember a child-like feeling — excitedly circling the area with my camera, finally experiencing one of the works of late British-Iraqi architect and Pritzker Prize Laureate Dame Zaha Hadid. As contemporary architecture continues to become accessible to the public realm, it challenges the notion that space needs to look a certain way to serve its function. In today’s day and age, we get to continue defining and re-defining words such as a wall, corner, ceiling, floor, window, opening, staircase, threshold, hallway… and that pushes us quite literally out of the box.
Take, for example, the Starfield Library (pictured below) — which is in fact not a standalone library and is located not within a school or university, but instead within COEX Mall. As I am a big fan of mixed-use spaces and keeping a hybrid mindset, I loved the case of the Starfield Library, which challenges the architectural status quo by saying: what if the bookshelf was the wall?
Right: Paradise City
My last stop before leaving Seoul is located within Paradise City, a mixed-use development which houses structures called “The Imprint” by the Netherlands-based firm MVRDV which were featured in publications including Dezeen and DesignBoom. This simple gesture of lifting the structure to create passageways is so simple yet so elegant and poetic — who would think that it houses one of Seoul’s most popular night clubs?
There are a few other works that I have not cited, and countless others that I would have loved to see, but the handful that I was able to interact with made me stop and reflect. Architect Louis Sullivan famously coined the phrase “Form Follows Function”, but function in the 21st century is ever-evolving, so by that standard, form will inevitably do the same.
