Herzog & de Meuron to deliver new Seoripul art storage facility in Seoul

Herzog & de Meuron has been announced as the winner of an international competition to design a new art storage facility for Seoul, called Seoripul Open Storage Museum. 

The contest was overseen by Seoul’s metropolitan government and involved an exhaustive community input process that saw over 850 citizens participate in the presentation and public vetting of designs from seven leading international firms.

The firm will now be tasked with designing the space for the Seoul Museum of Modern Art, the Seoul Museum of History, and the Seoul Museum of Craft Art. The South Korean capital is considered to be a new hot spot for contemporary art collectors given the recent exodus of the creative class from former regional mainstay Hong Kong and the city’s abundance of art museums, both large and small, including the new SongEun Art Space that was designed by Herzog & de Meuron in 2021. 

Herzog & de Meuron says they will leverage this experience along with their previous Schaulager project for the Laurenz Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, in order to create a building that is not only functional but itself an attractive draw for artists, their fans, and patrons. 

Speaking at the presentation, co-founder Jacques Herzog said: “What is an open storage? Or better, what is not an open storage? An open storage is not a museum, not a shopping mall, nor a fun palace, where there is a mass movement of people. It is a different kind of institution and therefore also needs a different kind of architecture. An open storage is a place where knowledge and culture exist in a very condensed form. Rather than fully expose everything like cigars in a humidor or trophy wines in a liquor store, they are places which should be enigmatic, mysterious, and raise curiosity.”

No construction timeline for the project was available at press time.