About this place
Samsung's flagship private art museum — three contrasting buildings by Botta, Nouvel, and Koolhaas holding Korean traditional art and international contemporary collections in Hannam-dong.
The Leeum Museum of Art occupies a hillside site in Hannam-dong that is as architecturally ambitious as it is rare: Samsung commissioned three of the world's most distinct architects to design three separate buildings on a single campus, each operating on a different formal logic.
Mario Botta's Museum 1 (M1) houses the traditional Korean collection — celadon ceramics, gold crown ornaments, Buddhist paintings, lacquerwork. The building's mass is stacked terracotta-clad cylinders, their geometry echoing the ancient vessels displayed inside. The rotunda at its core creates vertical circulation that feels ceremonial rather than efficient, as if the architecture is itself an act of veneration toward the objects it shelters.
Jean Nouvel's Museum 2 (M2) accommodates the contemporary collection. The exterior is a grid of black steel and glass panels — a dark, reflective surface that absorbs rather than announces. Inside, gallery volumes are stacked with deliberate irregularity, the spaces feeling edited and almost cinematic in how they sequence works by Rothko, Warhol, Beuys, and leading Korean postwar artists. The contrast with M1 next door is the point: tradition and modernity held in productive tension.
Rem Koolhaas's Samsung Child Education and Culture Center anchors the lower end of the site with a cantilevered concrete volume. Board-formed concrete against polished interiors, it reads less as a children's facility than as a demonstration of structural possibility — OMA's characteristic refusal to let a program dictate a building's ambition.
Petra Blaisse of Inside Outside handled the landscape, threading public terraces and garden paths between the three buildings. Moving between them becomes a fourth architectural experience: each exerts its own gravitational pull, and the campus circulation is as designed as the galleries themselves.
The permanent collection is strong enough to anchor a two-hour visit on its own — the traditional Korean galleries are among the finest accessible presentations of heritage objects anywhere in Seoul. The museum underwent a significant reopening in 2021, sharpening its programming and public identity. Best visited on a weekday morning; the rooftop terrace rewards the climb.
Culture · MuseumArchitecture · Museum Building