The new Amorepacific building, designed by British architect David Chipperfield, is one of the best new buildings I’ve seen in quite a while! The building stands starkly among the Seoul skyline as a giant cube. The glass facade is sheathed with white vertical poles giving it a monolithic immaterial appearance and shading the interiors. The cube is punctured with sky gardens that break up the mass of the building and visually connect an internal courtyard to the exterior.
Serving as corporate headquarters to Korea’s largest beauty company, the building is remarkably inviting to the public. At the centre of the building is a huge public glass-roofed atrium, open to the courtyard of the office block above. It’s really cool that the company has kept the atrium open to the public, and the building even has a fantastic public art museum located in the basement.
The materiality of the building interiors are largely raw off-form concrete with perfectly aligned joints and tie holes. A grid of concrete beams supports a massive skylight above the entire central atrium, with glass covered in a thin layer of water.
The details are perfectly crafted and refined as in all of Chipperfield’s buildings.
Images by Jonathan Choe
