“Seoul is not a pretty town, not at least by most Western senses of beauty. It is a sprawling mix of the haphazard, with little seeming cohesion, beyond a shared culture. Two hundred and fifty square miles of building after building, of all styles, of all facades (glass, brick, stucco, tile, fake brick, fake stucco), jammed up against each other, almost all covered in visually loud, bright, large ads.”
Seoul was never on my list of must-see places and the first paragraph of this brilliant photo essay sums up why, but the rest of the essay — and those photos! — managed to tempt me.