Amorepacific Headquarters & Museum of Art

Character

Amorepacific’s Yongsan headquarters places a public cultural interior inside a working corporate building: the lower levels hold the Amorepacific Museum of Art, a vast exposed-concrete atrium and other public facilities, while the offices rise above them inside David Chipperfield’s unusually broad cubical form

The architecture was conceived against the default logic of the Seoul office tower. A central courtyard cuts into the building’s deep plan, and three enormous openings break through the outer volume to bring daylight, air and distant views into the interior. From outside, those openings read almost like rooms removed from the cube; inside, they contain elevated gardens and help orient a building that would otherwise feel extremely dense

The basement through third floor hold the building’s public cultural spaces, while the workplace occupies the levels above. APMA sits inside the headquarters itself, with galleries, atrium and public circulation sharing the same lower floors that connect the building to the city

The experience

The underground connection from Sinyongsan Station leads directly into the headquarters, so arrival can happen through the building rather than from a plaza outside. The atrium rises through several levels, with exposed concrete, broad circulation and art or cultural programming occupying the same volume used by employees and visitors

APMA’s galleries extend across the first floor and basement. The museum’s collection grew from the Pacific Museum established in 1979 around Korean traditional art and material culture, then expanded into Korean and international modern and contemporary art. Rotating exhibitions now draw from both sides of that collection rather than fixing the museum to a single period

The building itself remains visible while moving through the public zone. Chipperfield’s façade uses a second skin of vertical fins to shade the glass, and the large openings interrupt that screen with deep voids. The hanging gardens above are part of the workplace rather than ordinary museum circulation, but they can be read from the atrium and exterior as part of the building’s unusually porous form

History

Amorepacific has occupied this Yongsan site since 1956. Its museum lineage began in 1979 with the Pacific Museum, initially centered on Korean traditional art, cosmetics culture and related material heritage before its collecting expanded into contemporary art

An international competition for the new headquarters was held in 2010. David Chipperfield Architects rejected a conventional slender tower and developed a wider cube around a central courtyard. Construction ran from 2014 to October 2017, employees began moving in late that year, and the project was formally marked with a completion ceremony in June 2018

The headquarters opened with cultural space built into its public base rather than added later. The museum, auditorium, library, restaurants and atrium were all part of the architectural brief. In 2018 the project received the grand prize in the Korean Architecture Award’s completed private-sector category, recognition that focused on its alternative to the standard high-rise office model

Before you go

APMA operates independently from the office floors, with its own exhibition calendar, ticketing and opening schedule. The public atrium and museum belong to the headquarters’ lower levels; the working office areas above are not part of a normal museum visit. Exhibition admission changes by show, so the museum’s current ticket page determines the actual price and reservation requirement