The office had just finished the design development of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao when we were approached by the electronic giant Samsung to design a museum of modern art in Seoul, Korea. At 40,000 SM - almost twice the size of Bilbao - the project would be the first museum project from the office in Asia. How would we make the design different than Bilbao? We were ready for a new challenge.

The site of the museum faced one of the most dynamic and busy boulevards in downtown Seoul. It was surrounded on four sides by different urban conditions and scales. Directly adjacent to the site to the east was a mid-rise modern office building; to the south was an elementary school in European Neo-classical style, and a traditional Korean royal residential complex to the west, with one-story commercial buildings beyond. Worst, directly across the main boulevard facing the site was the giant headquarter building of the Hyundai Group, Samsung’s main competitor in many businesses.

Consequently, the zoning envelop for the site stepped down dramatically from one side to the other, echoing the unconventional massing and scale of the surrounding buildings.

Our initial analysis of the zoning suggested a massing that lent itself towards an office or commercial tower rather than a cultural building such as a museum. To forcefully package the large program (including parking) into this zoning envelope would require multiple levels underground (image on left). In addition, the exhibition spaces stacking on top of each other above grade would result in a “high-rise museum” – with galleries of little opportunity for natural light (image on right).

Using physical models, we began a prolonged conceptual design process with the client and its curatorial team, to explore numerous alternatives in order to break out of this dilemma.

After about 6 months of rigorous dialogues, we finally arrived at a simple and elegant diagram for the museum: the galleries would be organized in the form of a stepping spiral – a rectilinear Guggenheim of sort – rising up from the underground. (The horizontal plane in the model represented the ground level). Each gallery space would have the possibility for natural light while allowing the massing to step from the lowest level towards its maximum height within the zoning envelope.

In this configuration, visitors would enter the museum on the street level, and either follow the escalators and stairs upward to visit the permanent collections, or step down to a large temporary exhibition space below grade.

The gently stepping galleries would have openings aligned to allow visual connections between the different levels. This high end of this rectilinear gallery spiral would rest on a block of museum administration and support spaces. All the spaces could be serviced by two elevator cores; for those visitors who wished to have direct access to the top.

We imagined the exterior of the spiral would be clad in a light color metal, such as stainless steel. Rather than the thin panels used in Bilbao that created a highly modulated finish, we envisioned this metal system would be applied as thick plates to achieve a smooth curvature on the finished surfaces.

This massing, when view from the side of the main boulevard, would give the street side sculptural animation (image on left); but would step down gently towards the side of the traditional Korean Royal residence (image on right).

When seen from the backside of the neo-classical building, the silhouette of the spiral recalled that of the Korean classical landscape painting - an important inspiration for the project.

Although it remains only as a proposal, the Samsung Museum of Modern Art in Seoul, Korea is one of the most influential projects I have worked on at the office. Not only did it set the precedence in how to respond to the unusual context of Seoul (and other cities in Asia), its organizational diagram would become the inspiration for many of the future museum projects to follow.