Reflecting now on my trip to Seoul I can see that a common thread in the architecture in Seoul is the scale, the ambition and more often than not the hideous ugliness that brings such character to the city. Take for example this…
This building was found whilst wandering the back streets and it is fantastic in its ugliness. The brutal industrial feeling from the exposed steel pipes and air conditioning units was nothing short of fantastic; the crooked arch windows. It was a building that said stop look at me. I am here and I don’t care that I am not beautiful.
Contrast this to the below K building which is apparently loved by the Koreans. It is the opposite to what is found in the back streets. It is the image that South Korea wants to portray to the world. Scale. Glass curtain walls. Dominance. Ability. They can make a K shaped building for goodness sake! It portrays wealth. But to me it is still aesthetically ugly. Even more so than my aforesaid exposed airconditioning unit find!
The South Koreans it seems love to build big. And they need to – the population in Seoul alone is so dense that 30 Million people live there.
The above building is a landmark in the myeongdong district and rightly so it is grandiose. The South Koreans love to show off and why not, they are an industrious nation and a growing economy.
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