Internationalising the Local: An Architectural Scenario for the First Metropolitan Apartments in Seoul’s Manhattan

Abstract

As urban regeneration projects of the late 1960s proceeded in an expanding Seoul, the Yeouido Apartments Project was in 1972 envisaged as the city’s the first international high-rise housing complex. The project was a joint venture between a government-sponsored architectural organisation and a US firm, collaborating to realise the architecture of the American metropolis in Korea. To create diverse and user-specific living environments, the architects embraced participatory design. In response to local conditions, the architecture’s structural, technological, and systematic ideas and details, views, mobilities and flows, and attention to future changes and growth were analysed and developed for emotive living environments. The Yeouido Apartments Project indexes a variety of contemporary architectural and urban concerns across time and place: from the international to the local, from the collective to the individual. Its narrative is one of internationalising the local by imagining a sustainable metropolitan apartment complex in the urban core of Seoul.