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The Seoul Metropolitan Government and the Cultural Heritage Administration have collided head on over the preservation of Seoul City Hall. On August 28, Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon issued a statement denouncing a move by the CHA and its Cultural Properties Committee, which designated the 82-year-old building as an historic landmark. If it had gone through, it would have had the effect of banning the city of Seoul from bulldozing the city hall building as part of its plan to build a building by early 2011. In response, the CHA and the properties committee blamed Oh for distorting information about the building’s structural safety and diminishing its cultural value.

As for the building safety issue, Oh said, “A large-scale renovation or demolition is urgent because the main building of the Seoul City Hall complex got grades of D and E for safety. There is a zero tolerance policy on the safety issue because the building will become a place for Seoul citizens after it is rebuilt as a public library,” Oh said. “To use it as a library, the building should be able to withstand the weight of books, so demolition and restoration work is unavoidable.”

However, CHA Administrator Lee Geon-mu said, “The main building of Seoul City Hall received a C grade, or a rating of being good, in safety inspections by the Korea Infrastructure Safety and Technology Corp. in 2001 and the Korea Institute of Construction Technology in 1996. I can’t trust in the city’s argument in favor of demolition, that the building’s structural integrity has deteriorated in just a couple of years.”

Yoon In-seok, the chairman of the civic group Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites and Neighborhoods of the Modern Movement said, “The reason why the city of Seoul is moving to bulldoze Taepyeong Hall (the main building of Seoul City Hall) is to remove the obstacles to constructing a new city hall building. Therefore, it’s difficult to say that there are structural problems. I suspect that the city of Seoul may have decided to transform the building into a library as justification to demolish it because libraries have to bear the heaviest loads.”

As for the issue of the building’s value as a cultural asset, Oh said, “In 2002, the CHA committee suspended the work of designating the main building as a cultural property, citing a lack of value for preservation. A year later, the building was designated as a cultural property following a process of reassessment. I can’t accept why the CHA would give the building, which was denied designation as a cultural property by the CHA six years ago, a provisional designation as a historical landmark at this point.”

In response, the CHA administrator, Lee, said that, following the introduction of the cultural property designation system in 2002, the CHA wanted to encourage the city of Seoul to use the building and preserve it well by designating it as a cultural property, rather than as an historical landmark, which would carry a lot of restrictions. He said, however, that the designation of City Hall as a cultural property was delayed after the 2002 assessment because, even though there were some who were of the opinion that the building was valuable as an example of historical architecture, others felt it was necessary to review another case involving the demolition in 1996 of a building located in Gyeongbok Palace used as a government complex during the period of Japanese colonial rule.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]