"Manhattan in the Alps"

What I think is really beautiful about Seoul is that it is a city that occurred on a site where there cannot really be a city. There isn't really room for a city there. So it's as if the metropolis has been established in the middle of the mountains, a city that has to coexist with mountains and beautiful forests, a kind of "Manhattan in the Alps." … The middle class lives in the flat parts, those who can afford everything and those who can afford nothing live on the hills. And throughout the city are scattered the remnants of this Metabolist project. And I simply like the speed with which it extends

..... Seoul, a city known for its eternal traffic, in the middle of the crisis all of a sudden became this kind of eerie, silent city with no traffic: a city without pollution. And maybe that was when I could finally see that Seoul was a kind of Switzerland, really beautiful.

Rem Koolhaas in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist
http://www.archphoto.it/huo.htm