MATERIAL THINKING

I’ve come to a hotel forecourt in Seoul’s Itaewon district to meet a landscape architect whose practice holds rockstar status in South Korea’s landscape community. After a patchy phonecall, a black BMW mounts the curb, tinted windows roll down and I’m invited to jump in the back; there’s no time to stop.

Jungyoon Kim is a founding director of Parkkim, a landscape architecture practice she runs with her partner Yoonjin Park in the upmarket district of Gangnam, made famous by that song we’d all rather forget. She and one of her senior colleagues have taken time out of their schedule to show me one of the practice’s largest built projects – the Yanghwa Riverfront Park on the bank of Seoul’s Han River.

Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is home to some 10 million people and has an international reputation as a high-tech city that embraces new ideas and technologies sooner than most. But it hasn’t always been this way. In the wake of the Korean