About this place
Paju Book City's central building, shaped like a stripped-down bookshelf: home to the Forest of Wisdom library, event halls and Hotel Jijihyang.
The Asia Publication Culture & Information Center is the heart of Paju Book City, the publishing town north of Seoul. It is the only signature building in the city whose architect, Kim Byung-yoon, was chosen by competition, and it won the Kim Swoo-geun Architectural Culture Award in 2004.
The building is a long, five-storey block reduced to the simple form of a bookshelf. It holds exhibition and event halls, an education centre and Hotel Jijihyang, whose name means "a home for paper", built so that visitors to Book City can stay overnight among the publishers.
Its best-known space today is the Forest of Wisdom (Jihye-ui Sup), a library of towering wooden shelves holding hundreds of thousands of donated books, with reading tables and seats along its length. Part of it stays open late into the night, and anyone can walk in and read. Combine it with a walk past the publishers' buildings and Álvaro Siza's Mimesis Art Museum.
Culture · LibraryArchitecture · Contemporary ArchitectureHospitality · Hotel