Clumps of Towers

On Friday Jon and I ventured to the Namsan mountain, a 262m peak right in the middle of the capital city. From the viewing platform of this natural edifice (largely populated by person sized teddy bears, small children and christmas tree shaped covered in padlocks) you could look out to Seoul's man made pinnacles, which appear in erratic clumps towards the mountains in distance. Crops of matte APT appear, identical in height and form not too far from those reflective towers of commerce, and weaving in between, a  carpet of low rise structures.

Later we went to the Seoul Museum of History. On the whole, the museum's displays were lacklustre, save from the extensive 1:1500 scale model of the city of Seoul. This 300sqm mini-city did not reflect Seoul as it is, but offers a glimpse of the future urban development of Seoul. This vision seemed to centre around a 'dubai-fication' of the city, where zones of glowing towers are accompanied by sweeping, gestural landscape projects such as Zaha Hadid's plans for an urban plaza and green space in Dongdaemun. Although these schemes are contributing to the image of Seoul as a design capital (2007) there still seems to be an urban scale that is lacking, somewhere in between the vastness of the APT, the width  of the Han and the expansive landscape plans for the city.