Day 8

The first place we visited today was Bongeunsa Buddhist Temple. It was founded in 794 during the reign of King Wonseong and is of stone and wood construction. Much of the temple is littered with places of prayer or historic murals.

The ceiling of many buildings are painted ornately with dome support columns having etchings written in them. There is a statue of bodhisattva Maitreya near the back of the temple made completely of stone. It sits on top of a platform with carvings at its base, surrounded by smaller statutes of itself. The entire temple is made of tradition Korean buildings meaning lists of wood, ornate painting just under roof overhangs and a roof crafted out of fires clay or stone tiles.

Lotte World Tower was our final stop of the day and my favorite so far. Lotte World Tower, also called SkyTower is the 5th tallest building in the world sitting at 555 meters tall. It has 123 floors total with floors 117 to 123 being used for there observation deck. Construction began in 2010 and finish in 2016 though the public wasn’t allowed in until the following year. The architect behind it was Kohn Peterson Fox and his concept for it was to mimic the shape of pottery and brushes as Korea has quite the history revolving them.

Sky Tower has 8 mega columns that span from floor B6F to 76F. These mega columns are responsible for supporting 40% of the total gravity load of this 750,000 ton building. The cost of construction was $3.4 Billion and let me tell you, it was worth every cent. The foundation it sits on top of lithified rock call banded gneiss, a type of metamorphic rock.

Today was particularly enjoyable because I got to see both the old and historic architecture of a Buddhist temple followed immediately by current day building techniques of the worlds 5th largest tower. The most odd thing about this was how neither feels out of place, Seoul has this way of blending new and old together seamlessly without taking away aspects from one or the other.

Overall Bongeunsa gets a 8/10 and Sky Tower gets 7/10