Seoul City Hall

Unique Design Made Possible by Texlon^® ETFE

Seoul’s City Hall is as unique as it gets. iARC Architects designed the extraordinarily shaped governmental building. The City Hall is filled with fantastic art installations, vertical gardens, hanging multi-level terraces, and three “floating blimps”, that are held up by columns. These blimps are made from 2 layers of Vector Foiltec’s Texlon^® ETFE foil. Inside the blimps, you can find a café and a conference hall for the mayors events.

Floating ETFE Blimps and Vertical Gardens

This project was driven by the vision of creating a public space that symbolizes Korean culture. The idea was to create a vertical expansion of Seoul Square, the symbolic center of the capital. The hanging terraces and floating spaces each add to the design intent of the building and are connected by curved stairs and pathways.

The three blimps have been created from 956 ETFE cushions, each of them uniquely shaped. ETFE is an extremely flexible material, so it is a great choice for an application like this. The foil chosen for this project is a mix of white and transparent, and can even be illuminated.

Unique Building Forms

Each of our projects comes with its own challenge. In the case of the Seoul City Hall, it was the integration of the blimps into the building. One of the blimps even pokes through the glass facade of the side of the building. On top of that, the integration of the columns holding the ETFE was quite challenging but could be solved by meticulous work and planning. For example, some of the columns penetrate a few of the ETFE cushions. To make sure the result would look as sophisticated as possible, our team took the measurements for these cushions in the field by hand.