When the sky shows its limit

The plan for the Yongsan International Business Zone — an enormous riverfront district that was to be highlighted by a 111-floor, 620-meter-high office tower circled by two dozen other superstructures — is all but dead. / Korea Times photo by Park Seo-gang

• Published May 1, 2013 5:20 PM KST
• Updated May 1, 2013 5:20 PM KST

Seoul’s skyscraper boom has crashed to earth and that’s not a bad thing

By Kim Tong-hyung

The world was still unaware it was walking into a financial crisis when Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon embarked on a mission to transform the city into a cluster of super-tall buildings. The Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008 ensured he would never get to inaugurate any of them.

The city’s fever for skyscrapers has come crashing to earth as a toxic combination of unemployment and soaring household debt lulled the real-estate market into a coma.

The biggest projects were the first to go. The 31 trillion won (about $28 billion) Yongsan International Business Zone, an enormous riverfront district that was to be highlighted by a 111-floor, 620-meter-high office tower circled by two dozen other superstructures, had represented Korea’s largest single property scheme ever. It ended up being a historic misfire after investors ran from it screaming.

Construction for the 133-floor DMC Landmark Building in Sangam-dong was supposed to have started last month. It didn’t and it’s unlikely anything will get going unless municipal authorities and developers agree to reduce the building’s height.

And it now looks like Hyundai Motor Group’s plan to erect a 110-story office tower in southern Seoul is in jeopardy too. New Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon is pressing the company to reduce the scale of the building and its surrounding complex as he moves to strengthen the law limiting the height of new structures, which signals a recommitment to sustainable urban planning.

During the era of economic self-confidence that was the mid-2000s, Seoul and its satellite cities approved nine new buildings that were 100 floors or higher. The 123-floor Lotte World Tower ― Lotte Group’s trophy structure that will be completed in 2015 ― could prove to be the only one that is actually built.

"City authorities, developers and investors are all guilty of seeing the future only through rose-tinted glasses,’’ said Park Won-gap, head of KB Kookmin Bank’s real estate business department.

"With the activity in the real-estate market subduing, these major development projects have been halted and under threat of being complexly derailed. It’s difficult for investors to follow through with the original plan when the lack of advance tenants could cripple them financially.’’

So there will be less landmark additions to Seoul’s skyline than originally planned. But is the city’s problem really a lack of altitude?

Oh, who lost his City Hall keys in 2011 after losing a vote on welfare issues, had lamented that Seoul didn’t have the cityscape of neighboring metropolises like Tokyo, Shanghai and Kuala Lumpur.

But architects, who regard the former mayor as a testament to bureaucratic overconfidence and myopia, wonder whether Seoul will ever seriously commit to being, well, Seoul.

While there have been some major adjustments to Seoul’s urban landscape in the past 20 years, the incoherence and lack of visual cohesion between architecture has been constant.

Perhaps the worst outcome of this is that city has nothing to show for being a 600-year-old metropolis, aside from its taxidermied palaces and the few patches of "hanok’’ (traditional houses) that survived ruthless waves of redevelopment. And this disconnection of past and present has prevented Seoul from having a true landmark that can define it.

Ideally, urban planning should be a creative process of interpreting a city’s historical context and finding a way to apply contemporary value to it. Drizzling drab skyscrapers on every business district probably aren’t the best way to do this when they are incapable of defining the mood and character of the city.

``When looking at the Western experience, a city goes through a lengthy period of debate and conflict before finding its landmark architecture its inhabitants agree as a symbol of the city. This process coincides with an evolvement in collective thinking on the relationship between the city and its architecture,’’ said Jeonghoon Lee, an award-winning architect and chairman of JOHO Architecture.

"A city could acquire a definitive landmark only through a long-term process rooted in debates about historical and cultural values. This is not something that can be slapped and done with the goals of completing that super-tall building by the end of the mayor’s term. The problem about Korean projects on landmarks is that they are creations from short-term bureaucratic goals rather than products of genuine discussions.’’