How Korea’s chaebols became the country’s most powerful architecture patrons

The site in Yongsan had been occupied by Amorepacific since 1956. The new headquarters, completed after eight years of design and construction, provides workspace for 7,000 people across 30 floors and 216,000 square metres. David Chipperfield Architects Berlin rejected a tower solution in favour of a cube, approximately 100 metres in width and height, its form loosely derived from the Korean white porcelain moon jar. 

Three large urban openings in the façade each contain a hanging garden, while a central inner courtyard maximises natural ventilation and daylight. Public amenities built into the lower floors — including the Amorepacific Museum of Art, an auditorium, a library, and childcare facilities — were a deliberate condition of the brief. The building holds LEED Gold accreditation.

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No private architectural commission in Korea comes close to what the Samsung Foundation of Culture assembled on the slopes of Namsan in Hannam-dong. Rather than appoint a single architect, the foundation invited three: Mario Botta to design Museum 1 (traditional Korean art), Jean Nouvel for Museum 2 (contemporary art), and Rem Koolhaas of OMA to produce both the master plan and the Samsung Child Education and Culture Centre. 

The result, which opened in 2004, is considered one of South Korea’s leading private institutions, holding a permanent collection of more than 15,000 works, including 36 pieces designated national treasures. The three buildings share an underground level but are architecturally independent above ground, each architect working to a distinct material palette and structural logic.

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Hanwha’s Galleria department store chain commissioned Amsterdam-based UNStudio to design a flagship in Cheonan, a city south of Seoul undergoing rapid development. The building features a double-layered façade with a trompe l’oeil pattern of vertical mullions that skews the perceived scale of the structure, with computer-generated animations incorporated into the lighting design to create a media façade that illuminates the building in a range of colours and effects. 

Principal architect Ben van Berkel designed the interior as a sequence of layered curved platforms, arguing that in contemporary Asia, the department store had evolved into a cultural institution as much as a commercial one. The project also engaged the question of how a building announces a new urban zone, since Galleria Centercity was among the first major commercial structures in that part of Cheonan.

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At 555 metres and 123 storeys, the Lotte World Tower is the tallest building in South Korea, the tallest in any OECD country, and the first in Korea to exceed 100 floors. It opened to the public in April 2017. Commissioned by the Lotte Group through an international design competition won by New York-based Kohn Pedersen Fox, the tower’s exterior — pale glass panels with a grid of white-lacquered metal — drew directly on traditional Korean craftsmanship. 

KPF intended the shape to be “reflective of Korean artistry”, contrasting the rounded, tapered profile against the surrounding mountainous topography. Inside, the programme encompasses retail, offices, the Signiel luxury hotel, serviced residences, and a 500-metre-high observatory.

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At 160 metres long and up to 75 metres wide, the Hyundai Motorstudio Goyang is the largest mobility theme park in South Korea. Designed by Vienna-based Delugan Meissl Associated Architects, who won an invited international competition in 2011, the building is organised around three architectural moves: a ground-level landscape, walls of vertical planting, and a “shaped sky” — an organically formed cantilevered roof housing cinemas, exhibition galleries, a multipurpose hall, and offices. The shaped sky is supported by only four concrete cores and six slender column clusters, their positions computationally optimised to minimise obstructions below. The building integrates sales, brand experience, and automotive culture under one roof. Hyundai has since expanded the Motorstudio model to Busan, Beijing, and Moscow.

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After 22 years in Gangnam, the LG Arts Center relocated to the fast-developing Magok district in western Seoul, opening in October 2022 within Seoul Botanic Park. Tadao Ando’s design is organised around three spatial concepts, the most arresting of which is the Tube: a 10-metre-high circular passage that runs diagonally through the building’s ground floor, connecting the Seoul Botanic Park to the adjacent LG Science Park. The venue comprises a 1,335-seat performance hall, the LG SIGNATURE Hall, and a 365-seat black box theatre. It received the Grand Prize at the 2023 Seoul Architecture Awards.

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