Architectural Spectrum

I am fascinated by architecture. Were I not studying music, I would probably study architecture (both kind of dead end subjects as far as careers go, but they are fun). Anyway, I saw some pretty awesome buildings while in Korea and Japan. There are literally two worlds of architecture in these countries: modern and traditional. Here are a few examples of some interesting things I saw in Korea.

Here, we have a very traditional building. It has the classic Asian, tiled rooftops. It is amazing how these magnificent structures were built so long ago.

Then, as you travel down the street a little bit, you find this rising up out of nowhere.

Then, when those two worlds are combined you get this.

This is seen everywhere in Asia, where there are many traditional buildings among the modern. The places where these traditional structures stand were usually places of great importance or where the heart of the city was located. The Asian people take a lot of pride in these buildings and structures and are putting out tons and tons of money to have them preserved. If I remember correctly, this area is currently being restored. Most of it was destroyed in war. 

Now, time for the winner of my favorite building in Korea (there's another in Japan that I think is a lot cooler, but this one wins architecturally). Most buildings that are put up have a lot of glass. My thoughts go out to the poor window washing boy.

(Isn't this just so awesome?)

It's almost like they were building it and didn't realize they weren't quite going straight up, then just decided to correct it by slanting back in the other direction. I'm pretty sure that's exactly what happened. That's my guess.

Now, we turn to Japan. I saved some of my favorite pictures for the specific part. As far as coolness goes, Japan wins by a long shot (sorry to any Korea fans. That's just my opinion). The Japanese are just so hip and modern and cool, yet humble and silent but powerful. They really know how to make things awesome. 

Traditional Japanese architecture is slightly more elegant than traditional Korean architecture. How so? It just feels that way. The Japanese have more attention to detail and use finer materials. For example: Koreans tile their roofs with clay tiles. Japanese will use copper, because they know that in a couple hundred years you get one of the most beautiful shades of green you will ever see.

Isn't this absolutely gorgeous? Now check out this next one. It's built over the water so that it has a cool reflection thing going on. The material used for this one is gold. Yes. This is a gold building. They sure went all out with this one. 

Here is one more unique building. This one houses the Big Buddha. Inside this one is a huge shrine and a gigantic Buddha. You'll hear more about this in a later post.

That's a little look into traditional Japanese architecture. On to the modern stuff. I'm so excited! 

There were cool buildings everywhere and they were even cooler at night when they were all lit up. Exhibit A.

Exhibit B. Not too exciting, but pretty cool in it's own respect.

Exhibit C. This one is cool, because I imagined it as being constructed from the top down. Either that or they built a small middle section and built out from the sides. I like the building from top to bottom idea. It makes the picture more interesting.

And finally, one of my Japan favorites. Exhibit D.

Now that I've bored you to death, here is the moment you have all been waiting for. My favorite building. The architecture is very, very simple. It's just a gigantic box. The reason I liked it so much was because it blended so well with nature. It was so interesting. I just happened to catch it at the perfect moment. Here is what I saw.

I thought that this was pretty amazing. I just love how it blends in with the sky. In the last picture, it's almost like there is no building there at all, or most of it is missing. 

Anyway, I hope that you were able to make it to the end of this post. There wasn't much explanation of the buildings. I just wanted to give you a little glimpse of what I saw and a little of what I thought about it. Even if you didn't read anything, I'm sure you enjoyed the pictures.