Newspaper
Herzog & de Meuron’s South Korean debut is a triangular triumph
Angle delight
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erzog & de Meuron make their South Korean debut with a monolithic new office building and cultural space in Seoul that boasts a majestic triangular silhouette, a shape directly informed by the area’s zoning laws. Housing the corporate HQ of ST International, a Korean energy and mining conglomerate, and its constituent SongEun Art & Cultural Foundation, which operates a non-profit art space, this striking 11-storey edifice rises from the street like a sheer cliff face. The south façade presents a continuous concrete plane interrupted by two slender windows that puncture the otherwise uniform surface. These precise incisions, the larger of which is more than 13m tall, accentuate the verticality of the structure while hinting at the spaces contained within. A textured patchwork of intricate patterns lends the building’s concrete surfaces a tactile quality: when casting the concrete, builders installed several thousand square plywood boards, each of which yielded a unique imprint of its natural wood grain on the concrete as it hardened. At the bottom of the façade, both corners are cut away to create lateral recesses that serve as points of entry for pedestrians and vehicles. As visitors pass beneath the suspended
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mass of the building’s cantilevered upper floors towards the main entrance, they emerge into an airy courtyard ringed by a walled garden. It is here that the glass-covered rear façade begins its angular ascent, receding from view as it climbs towards the sharply pointed apex. Inside, the focal point of the lobby is a spiralling vertical layer of concrete that carves a nautilus-shaped void out of the floor, opening onto a cavernous subterranean exhibition space below. Tracing the outer perimeter of this hollow concrete corkscrew is a circular staircase that leads to a second floor exhibition space. More than just an aesthetic flourish, this is the result of an inevitable spatial constraint generated by the internal curvature of the parking ramp, which circumscribes the gaping cavity excavated from the centre of the lobby. To inaugurate the building, an exhibition, curated by Herzog & de Meuron and the SongEun Art & Cultural Foundation, invites the public to explore its spaces and consider the relationship between architecture and art. Some of the most evocative works on view comprise a photographic series by Jihyun Jung, who accessed the site during all phases of construction and documented its progress. herzogdemeuron.com
Above, the concrete 11-storey façade of Herzog & de Meuron’s ST/SongEun Building is imprinted with intricate wood grain patterns and is nearly 60m in height Top, a nautilus-shaped void in the ground-floor lobby opens onto a subterranean exhibition space
PHOTOGRAPHY: JIHYUN JUNG WRITER: ANDY ST LOUIS