From the top floor to the fourth: How the 63 Building found new life

 Lee Eun-ju 

The author is a senior culture reporter at the JoongAng Ilbo.

In 2012, I had the opportunity to interview Italian architect Renzo Piano, now 88. Fifty-five years ago, in 1971, he stunned the architectural world when he and British architect Richard Rogers won the competition to design Paris's Centre Pompidou. In 1998, he received the Pritzker Architecture Prize, often described as the Nobel Prize of architecture.

Yet the word Piano emphasized most throughout our conversation was surprisingly simple: public space. Public space means it is a place that welcomes people from all walks of life — a space where they can gather, linger, and rest. “The buildings we want to create are truly for people,” he said. “That's what makes them approachable and encourages people to stay.” He even added that creating such buildings “is the greatest ambition of architects.”

That conversation came back to me recently when I visited Seoul's 63 Building.

Completed in 1985, the 249.6-meter skyscraper was once a powerful symbol of Korea's economic rise. As taller towers gradually reshaped the skyline, however, its prominence faded. But on June 4, the building began attracting visitors once again with the opening of Centre Pompidou Hanwha. Created through a four-year partnership between France's Centre Pompidou and the Hanwha Culture Foundation, the museum occupies a renovated annex of the 63 Building. Its inaugural exhibition, Cubists: Visionaries of Perception, runs through October 4.

What deserves particular attention is not simply the museum itself but where it is located.

Designed by French architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte, the museum occupies the first through fourth floors of the annex — not the top of the tower, but a place people can easily reach on foot. It is a markedly different choice from Tokyo's Roppongi Hills, where the Mori Art Museum sits on the 53rd floor. Around the same time, the observatory reopened under a new name, while a garden designed by Dutch landscape architect Piet Oudolf was added to the complex. The museum, along with the restaurants and cafes connected to the building's underground level, is now filled with visitors.

Of course, simply placing a museum inside an office tower does not guarantee this kind of revival.

The real key is public space.

Rather than asserting its significance through sheer height, as it once did, the 63 Building has reinvented itself as a place that invites people in and encourages them to stay. There was a time when we admired buildings simply because they were taller and larger than anything else around them. But the landscape of architectural competitiveness in the 21st century has changed. The buildings that endure are those that welcome people, embrace culture and give visitors a reason to return.

Seen in that light, the transformation of the 63 Building is more than a renovation. It represents the evolution of the modern city itself — from an era defined by height to one defined by culture.