The Buyeo museum is a magnificent piece of architecture…too bad the optics are all wrong and it would have looked perfect in Japan, but is just a tad out of place in a Korean context.

Open-faced concrete was of course a worldwide convention, and there are a lot of buildings in Vancouver (as presumably elsewhere) from the 60s with that medium. Interesting stuff.

The attempt to “humanize” the bold lines of modern architecture was universal, too. The most famous local Vancouver architect, Arthur Erickson, developed a “West Coast” style that adapted building designs to mimic the natural landscape of water, rocks, and trees…Simon Fraser University (mid 60s) is probably the best known example. He was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, who was a “pre-modern” architect with a similar design paradigm, whose representative work is Falling Water (1935).

The old city wall—which you alluded to in various places—of course still exists in bits and pieces, with most of the gates either extant or restored and two simply gone (Seodaemun and Seosomun). There’s a plaque on Saemunan-gil (?) between Jonggak and Seodaemun intersection that marks where the actual Seodaemun gate used to stand. The wall itself still stands in an arc from the Sajik tunnel in the northwest, around the north part of Seoul, to just north of Dongdaemun, with an orphan segment across the ridge of Namsan.