Seoul City Hall

Seoul City Hall occupies a site in the South Korean capital that has served as the seat of city government since the country's 1945 liberation, when an earlier 1925 building constructed in the Imperial Crown Style under Japanese occupation took on that role. The current building, designed by the architect Yoo Kerl of the firm iArc after his selection in a February 2008 competition, opened to the public on August 27, 2012, with city government offices relocating there several days later. Yoo drew explicitly on traditional Korean architecture in the design, citing the low-rise horizontal massing and curved lines of Korean building tradition as his starting point, and the structure derives more than a quarter of its energy from photovoltaic, solar thermal and geothermal sources behind a double-skin facade. Its most striking feature is an interior vertical garden spanning some 1,516 square meters and holding more than 70,000 plants across fourteen species, recognized by Guinness World Records in 2013 as the largest green wall in the world. The building also displays a large sculptural installation of white balloons by the artist Jheon Soo-cheon, arranged in a tornado-like pattern intended to evoke Seoul's two-thousand-year history as a capital city.