About this place
Tadao Ando's cultural complex in Hyehwa-dong — two concrete volumes (JCC Art Center and JCC Creative Center) set into the hillside below Naksan, housing galleries, a performance hall, and art education spaces.
JCC Art Center (Jaeneung Culture Center, 재능문화센터) is a cultural complex designed by Tadao Ando in collaboration with Korean firm Gansam Partners, completed in 2015 in the Hyehwa-dong neighbourhood of Jongno-gu. It comprises two separate buildings — the JCC Art Center and the JCC Creative Center — set into the slope below Naksan (낙산), one of the inner ring of mountains that originally defined the boundary of Joseon-era Seoul.
The two buildings are connected by a landscaped path that follows the topography of the hillside. Ando's characteristic material language — board-formed concrete, large glazed openings, and controlled natural light — is applied throughout both volumes, but the buildings are differentiated by programme: the Art Center contains exhibition galleries and a performance space; the Creative Center houses art education studios. Both are partially embedded in the hillside, reducing their visible mass from the street.
The complex is operated by the Jaeneung Education Foundation, which funded the project as a cultural contribution to the Hyehwa neighbourhood, already Seoul's primary theatre district. The site sits a short distance from Changgyeonggung Palace and Ihwa Mural Village, within a dense network of university campuses, bookshops, and small theatres. The decision to place a significant Tadao Ando building here — rather than in a more prominent commercial district — reflects both the scale of the project and its civic intentions.
JCC Art Center is one of the lesser-visited of Ando's Korean works, but architecturally among the most coherent: the integration of building, landscape, and topography on a constrained urban hillside site is handled with precision.
Culture · Cultural CenterArchitecture · Museum Building