The boom in Seoul’s corporate museums

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For most cities, big new art museums are expensive, troublesome, long in gestation and make global headlines when they open. In Seoul, though, a wave of remarkable institutions, often funded by big corporations, have opened in rapid succession. Does this art/architecture nexus define the increasingly porous world between museums, commercial galleries, corporate branding, auction houses, art fairs and design?

Seoul’s model is radically hybrid. Take, for instance, the ST SongEun Building designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron. A sharp concrete wedge poking through the skyline, this might look like the world’s first skyscraper museum — but it is not. It is instead an office tower in which the gallery is not squeezed into a corporate lobby but rather the office becomes an extrusion of the architecture of the museum at its base, commerce rooted in culture. Herzog & de Meuron’s characteristic sculptural concrete creates an unmissable punctuation mark able to hold its own even in the dense high-rise skyline of Cheongdam in the Gangnam district.

The museum is free to enter from a small public plaza set off the main road. Quiet and dark, its concrete walls are a little sepulchral, the stairs spiral down (in typically H&deM style) to a gallery that looks like a blend of the best underground car park you’ve ever seen with Tate Modern’s industrial, slightly ominous Tanks. It then leads on to the actual car park, which in turn looks oddly like a gallery. The concrete surfaces, board-marked and resembling the blade of a samurai sword, are perhaps the finest I have ever seen, almost liquid in their watery grain.

Another corporate HQ/museum combo by a global name is Amore Pacific’s megablock, a massive translucent cube in the city’s Yongsan district. Designed by David Chipperfield Architects, the beauty company’s main office sits atop a large, open public lobby with upmarket tea, coffee and bookshops, the whole thing on a scale more familiar from an airport. Here too the museum is downstairs, housing a series of temporary exhibitions focused on both traditional and contemporary art of a high quality.

If the spaces above are characterised by a diaphanous sense of a dissolving structure, below they are solid, heavy and serious. Chunky concrete columns punctuate vast, flexible spaces. For each exhibition, a new interior architecture is created, often striking. The dark solidity of the basement is balanced at the top of the building by a cut-out garden, a void in the structure planted with trees and shrubs floating incongruously above the site.

Not far away is the daddy of Seoul’s corporate museum boom, the Samsung Foundation’s Leeum Museum. One of the art world’s great concentrations of starchitects, it comprises buildings by OMA’s founder Rem Koolhaas, Mario Botta and Jean Nouvel. The campus presents a collection of buildings in radically different styles, from Botta’s brick castle to Nouvel’s slightly sinister black boxes. But it works. Koolhaas’s sweeping concrete and glass skeletal structure is the slickest, setting a tone that is then disrupted by the others. With its collection of sculptures and structures, it feels like a discreet neighbourhood, a mini-city of art.

It is far livelier than the contemporaneous state-owned sprawl of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, which appears to be dying a slow death with only small corners of the building activated (although those that are inhabited are well-curated and smart). The MMCA is also a rare exception in having been designed by a South Korean (Hyunjun Mihn/MPART Architects) but its plaza has the eerie feel of a communist parade ground.

One of the more recent corporate offerings, and among the liveliest of all the city’s new cultural spaces, is Hyundai Card’s STORAGE. It builds on the success of the credit card company’s music library, a quirky and successful vinyl-lending institution that belies Seoul’s high-tech obsessions. Stuffed into the building’s basement and announced by a lurid flamingo-pink neon sign, the space is reimagined for each show, from raw concrete for design and fashion to digitally activated black box for more immersive or performance installations.

Seoul is a corporate city and its cultural architecture tells that story with devastating clarity

The city also boasts one of the late Zaha Hadid’s most complete and impressive projects, the Dongdaemun Design Plaza. It is a stunning urban intervention, a fluid landscape of swirling, streamlined concrete that looks like it has been shaped by a fast flowing river (of traffic, perhaps). As an urban set-piece for a 24-hour neighbourhood it works well: people wander around its futuristic forms, up on to its roofs and through complex geometries of green islands, underpasses and level shifts. But inside it too seems to be struggling, many of its huge, theatrical spaces bleakly empty while the endless corridors and internal walkways with their carpeted floors and cold lighting feel like leftover space, unfillable, whether due to their scale or their curious form.

The most recent arts behemoth sees a corporation turning to music rather than art. LG’s vast Gangseo corporate campus features, among its rather anonymous glass blocks and research centres, the LG Arts Centre designed by Tadao Ando. Formerly one of the most revered masters of minimalism, here Ando seems to segue into corporate mode with a building that is slick and cool but lacks the formal rigour of his most memorable work.

Instead we have a composition of a cylindrical concrete core and glass box around it. Throughout the whole thing runs a “tube”, a corrugated concrete oval-sectioned channel that connects other parts of the campus and makes the visitor feel a little like a clot moving through an artery. A rotating display of public art and design punctuates the interior, making a kind of lobby museum. The 1,300-seater auditorium is, on the other hand, superb, with very fine acoustics. It is also surprisingly conservative with its classical horseshoe form and sweeping balconies.

This explosion of cultural architecture is bolstered by a burgeoning commercial gallery scene producing equally architecturally adventurous buildings. As a result, the continuing obsession with the big global stars is, perhaps, beginning to look a little played out. The smaller, more inventive arts projects that are still exploding all over the city can make the megabucks corporate buildings look a little clunky. Too much money, perhaps.

Seoul is a corporate city and its cultural architecture tells that story with devastating clarity. But one could equally argue that the big corporations are investing in a cultural infrastructure of huge capacity and genuine variety.