Dongdaemun Design Plaza and the District That Works at Night

Zaha Hadid won the competition in 2007 and the plaza opened on 21 March 2014, after an argument that ran the whole time. The site had held a baseball stadium, and beneath it lay a section of the Joseon-era city wall and a military training ground, which excavation uncovered mid-project. The design was criticised for cost, for ignoring the district's character, and for being an alien object in a market quarter.

What exists now is a landform rather than a building: a skin of curved aluminium panels, each one a different shape, wrapped around exhibition halls, a design museum, shops and a conference centre, with public ramps running over and through it. There are no right angles anywhere and no single entrance, and the interior circulation is genuinely disorienting the first time.

The excavated wall and the foundations of the training ground were kept and are displayed in Dongdaemun History & Culture Park on the northern side, free and open. That juxtaposition — a fourteenth-century wall footing under a twenty-first-century shell — is the most interesting thing on the site, and most visitors walk past it to photograph the curves.

Walk the outside first. The ramps take you over and around the shell, and the building reads completely differently from each angle — this is the part that justifies the trip and it costs nothing.

The LED rose garden on the northern lawn is a field of illuminated roses that switches on after dark; it is a permanent installation rather than a seasonal one, and it is the photograph most people leave with. In winter the plaza also hosts Seoul Light, a large-scale media-art projection onto the building's skin.

Inside, the exhibition programme changes constantly — design, fashion, art and commercial shows, some free, most ticketed at prices set per exhibition. Check what is on before you plan an interior visit, because between shows the halls can be empty.

The design shop and the Seoul Design Museum are worth thirty minutes if you are already inside, and the building's cafés are ordinary.

Dongdaemun is the wholesale clothing centre of Korea, and its rhythm is inverted. The large fashion malls surrounding DDP open in the evening and trade through the small hours — some from around 20:00 until 05:00 — because their customers are retailers from across the country buying stock to sell the next day.

For a visitor that means two things. First, the district after midnight is genuinely busy, and the streets around the plaza are lit, safe and full of people at an hour when the rest of Seoul has gone home. Second, prices are wholesale-adjacent: buying one of something is possible in the retail-facing malls, less so in the wholesale ones, and haggling is normal.

The night market stalls on the streets nearby sell food alongside clothing, and the whole area is the closest Seoul comes to a genuine all-night quarter. The metro stops around midnight, so plan the way back — taxi rules and the transfer window.