The pagoda building
Kang Bong-jin · 1972
Stand back in the forecourt and look up. A five storey pagoda with sweeping blue tiled roofs rises from a stepped white podium, reached by a great central staircase flanked by balustrades, with lower halls spreading out on either side. It looks like a temple assembled from several places at once, and that is exactly what it is. The architect Kang Bong-jin designed the building in the late 1960s as the new National Museum of Korea, and it was completed in 1972. The tower reproduces the wooden pagoda Palsangjeon at Beopjusa temple, the tallest surviving wooden pagoda in Korea; the halls to the sides echo Mireukjeon at Geumsansa and Gakhwangjeon at Hwaeomsa, and the terraces and stairs recall the stone platforms of Bulguksa in Gyeongju.
The building belongs to a moment when South Korea, under President Park Chung-hee, wanted its new national institutions to look unmistakably Korean, and concrete was used to reproduce forms that had originally been built in timber. Walk around the base and you will see the brackets, railings and roof ends cast in concrete and painted in the traditional dancheong colours. Purists have always argued about whether this is homage or pastiche, but the silhouette has become one of the most recognisable in Seoul, especially seen from Samcheong-dong with the palace roofs and Bugaksan behind it.
The National Museum used the building until 1986, when it moved into the former Japanese Government-General building, and the Folk Museum took over here in 1993 after decades of moving between temporary homes. The museum's own history goes back to 1945, when it was founded in the months after liberation. A relocation of the museum to a new site in Sejong has been planned, so the pagoda building may one day have yet another tenant.
Did You Know? The tower copies the wooden pagoda at Beopjusa temple, but here it is a hollow concrete shell: there is no five storey interior behind those roofs.
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