About this place
The Paju Book City home of publisher Open Books: two long concrete bars with folded, angled forms that suggest the pages of a book mid-turn.
This 2005 building by Himma Studio houses Open Books (Yeollin Chaekdeul), one of the publishers that moved to Paju Book City, the purpose-built publishing town north of Seoul. Paul Tulett includes it in his survey Brutalist Korea as one of the country's new brutalist works.
The building is made of two long, parallel concrete bars, which the architects read as lines of text running side by side. Their angled, folded surfaces give the impression of a book caught partway through a page turn. The raw concrete and strong shapes stand out even in Book City, where most buildings follow strict shared design guidelines.
Paju Book City is best explored on foot: combine this with the Asia Publication Culture & Information Center and its Forest of Wisdom library, and with Álvaro Siza's Mimesis Art Museum nearby.
Architecture · Brutalism