Landscape Architecture Australia — February 2018

I

’ve come to a hotel forecourt in Seoul’s

Itaewon district to meet a landscape

architect whose practice holds rockstar

status in South Korea’s landscape

community. After a patchy phonecall,

a black BMW mounts the curb, tinted

windows roll down and I’m invited to

jump in the back; there’s no time to stop.

Jungyoon Kim is a founding director of

Parkkim, a landscape architecture practice

she runs with her partner Yoonjin Park in

the upmarket district of Gangnam, made

famous by that song we’d all rather forget.

She and one of her senior colleagues have

taken time out of their schedule to show me

one of the practice’s largest built projects

• the Yanghwa Riverfront Park on the bank
  of Seoul’s Han River.

Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is home to

some 10 million people and has an

international reputation as a high-tech city

that embraces new ideas and technologies

sooner than most. But it hasn’t always been

this way. In the wake of the Korean War in

the 1950s and 60s, South Korea was one of

the world’s poorest countries. Half a century

later and it is Asia’s fourth-largest economy,

largely thanks to the success of family-run

business conglomerates, or chaebols, such

as Samsung, Hyundai Motor Group, SK

Group and LG Corporation. These four

companies alone account for half the

country’s stock market value.^1

The urban fabric of Seoul reflects this rapid,

market-led transformation – there is a

scarcity of parks and open space, the average

age of buildings is just twenty-eight years^2

and, more recently, numerous architectural

“icons” have been constructed to portray the

city’s new image of itself as a prosperous

g loba l met ropolis in nor t h- ea st A sia.

But a s is com mon pract ice in emerg ing

world cities, design expertise was eagerly

imported from established names, rather

than identified locally. “Fly-in fly-out”

architects from Europe or North America

(think Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid, MVRDV,

OMA and others) have designed many of

Seoul’s most high-profile urban projects,

which has led to many areas that feel

placeless and ignorant of their contexts.

In the words of Professor John Hong from

Seoul National University, “Seoul is [now]

st r ug g ling to redef ine it self a s a place of

culture.”^3 K im put s it a lit t le more blunt ly:

“In Seoul you find many shits of foreign

architects,” she jokes as we drive across one

of the many bridges that span the Han River.

The mayor of Seoul holds considerable

power and plays a major role in setting the

city’s development agenda. In 2003, former

mayor Lee Myung-bak (himself a former

CEO of Hyundai Motors) initiated a bold

project to replace an elevated highway with

a linear park and restored stream, the

Cheonggyecheon. It was designed by local

practice SeoAhn Total Landscape and has

proved so popular with the public that many

agree it won Lee Myung-bak the South

Korean presidency in 2008.

This time of intense interest and investment

in improving Seoul’s urban environment

coincides with the establishment of

Parkkim in 2006, a couple of years before

the global financial crisis put the brakes on

development. While originally from Seoul,

Park and Kim were educated in the United

States at Harvard University’s Graduate

School of Design (GSD), and their first

landscape architecture roles were in Boston

• Kim at Child Associates and Park at Sasaki
  Associates. They were both working at
  urban design and landscape architecture
  practice West 8 in the Netherlands when
  t hey made t he decision to ret ur n to Seou l
  to participate in the city’s new wave of
  development and to help undo the negative
  aspects of a previous generation of
  urbanism.^4

We arrive at the Yanghwa Riverfront Park,

one of Parkkim’s first big commissions. It

formed part of the City of Seoul’s wider Han

River Renaissance Project, initiated under

the leadership of the mayor at the time,

Oh Se-hoon. The project saw a significant

stretch of the southern bank of the Han River

revitalized in stages by numerous design

consultants. Under Oh Se-hoon’s leadership,

Seoul heavily invested in citywide, design-

led urban regeneration processes, which was

unprecedented in Asia.

“A hundred years ago there was a beautiful

sand beach here. But now the Han River is a

totally controlled river, with dams upstream

dictating flow,” explains Kim.

Over the past century the course of the river

has been heavily modified, with terraced

Jungyoon Kim (top) and
Yoonjin Park (above), the
founding directors of South
Korean practice Parkkim.