Somehow I had never heard of the amazing Leeum Museum until researching for a recent trip to Seoul, Korea. The world class cultural institution was created by the electronics conglomerate Samsung, and sits at the top of a hill in an eclectic neighbourhood in the centre of the South Korean capital.
Samsung commissioned an all-star lineup of architects to design the gallery buildings. The museum complex was masterplanned by OMA and features buildings designed by Mario Botta, Rem Koolhaas (OMA), and Jean Nouvel. It doesn’t get much better than that! Each of the buildings is stylistically distinct and appear as a separate building sitting in a park-like atmosphere. But all three buildings are joined together in the basement, creating a unified gallery experience.
The OMA (Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren) designed building acts as a connective tissue for the rest of the museum campus, hosting an underground carpark and central lobby. The building also features an event venue sculpted from black pigmented concrete.
The brick-clad building by Mario Botta is designed in his typical postmodern style with oversized classical references. I’m not a big fan of postmodernism but have absolutely loved every Botta building that I have seen. The details and proportions are so precise and the internal spaces are so finely crafted that his buildings are really remarkable.
At the centre of Mario Botta’s building is an atrium which acts as vertical circulation for his galleries and lets light down into the common basement.
The Botta designed building has some of the most interesting large-scale artwork, including the immersive staircase experience by Olafur Eliasson pictured below (see another architecturally-integrated artwork by Olafur Eliasson here):
Jean Nouvel‘s gallery is a dramatic black box perched at the end of the campus. The building is carved into a hill which is retained by a gabion wall. Glass walls facing the gabion wall allows indirect lighting into the gallery spaces.
Images by Jonathan Choe
