Seoul's 'High Heel' Tower: A Flood-Resilient Sponge City
2 days ago
4 min read
Seoul knows how quickly water can turn from a comfort into a crisis. The city's monsoon season has grown more volatile in recent years, turning ordinary streets into rivers and testing the limits of even the most modern drainage systems. Into this reality steps a new residential tower from Italian studio CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati and South Korean construction giant GS E&C. This building doesn't fight the water, but learns to live alongside it.
Seoul's 'High Heel' Tower. Image Courtesy of CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati
Rising 140 metres above the city, the tower stands on a set of slender, elevated supports the designers describe as "high heels." It's a playful name for a serious idea: lift the building, open the ground, and let the site breathe again.
Most towers claim the ground they stand on, sealing it beneath concrete and steel. This one gives it back. By raising the residential volume onto slim vertical supports, the design frees up the site at street level, letting rainwater, greenery and daily life share the space the building would otherwise have consumed.
The approach borrows from the "sponge city" philosophy now shaping flood-resilient design across Asia. Rather than rushing stormwater straight into the city's drains, the landscape beneath the tower is built to slow it down first, letting the ground absorb what it can before the rest moves on. It's a shift from treating water as an enemy to treating it as a resource worth holding onto, even briefly.
That same open footprint also protects what was already growing there. The site's existing trees remain undisturbed by the tower rising above them, while the reclaimed ground becomes new public space for the surrounding block. It's a quiet kind of preservation — less about grand gestures, more about simply not getting in the way.
Seoul's 'High Heel' Tower. Image Courtesy of CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati
The space freed up at ground level doesn't sit empty. Gardens, dining lounges and tea houses fill the open-air courtyard beneath the tower, turning what could have been a lobby into something closer to a neighbourhood square. Daylight reaches these lower levels precisely because the building has lifted itself out of the way, giving residents a genuinely open, sunlit gathering space rather than a shaded underpass.
A community farm anchors much of this shared life, folding food production into the daily rhythm of the building. Neighbours who might otherwise pass each other in a hallway instead find themselves tending the same beds or sharing produce, gestures small enough to feel casual but consistent enough to build real community.
That spirit keeps rising through the tower itself. Korean building codes require a refuge floor every 30 storeys, mandatory safe zones usually treated as pure infrastructure. Here, each one becomes an elevated garden instead — spaces that double as protected refuges during emergencies and as everyday social spaces the rest of the time, scattered like green terraces through the height of the building.
Seoul's 'High Heel' Tower. Image Courtesy of CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati
Above the gardens and the community farm, the tower's outer skin does its own quiet work. Rather than wrapping the building in one uniform glass curtain, the façade shifts depending on which way each side faces. The south elevation carries photovoltaic panels, turning Seoul's sunniest exposure into a source of clean energy for the building itself.
To the east and west, where the sun sits lower and heat becomes harder to manage, vertical louvres step in to filter the light before it reaches the glass. The effect is practical, cutting unwanted heat gain, but it's also felt from the inside. Residents move through rooms where the quality of light changes with the hour and the season — a subtle reminder that the building is always responding to the sun, not simply blocking it out.
“Cities have spent much of the last century trying to make water disappear as quickly as possible. In Seoul, facing a changing climate, we ask how a tower can give water more time and space. Lifting the building on 'high heels,' we let the ground keep its trees, absorb stormwater, and work as part of the city's climate adaptation system.” - Carlo Ratti, founding partner of CRA and professor at MIT and Politecnico di Milano.
The Seoul tower extends a line of thinking CRA has been developing for years, from the public gardens woven through Singapore's CapitaSpring to the urban farming embedded in Shenzhen's Jian Mu Tower. Here, the focus turns specifically to water — not as a hazard to be engineered away, but as a partner in how a dense city might grow. In heels this tall, the building doesn't just rise above the flood risk. It makes room for the water to stay a little while, and for the life of the street to rise right along with it.
Seoul's 'High Heel' Tower. Image Courtesy of CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati
CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati is an international design and innovation practice with studios in Turin, New York, and London. Rooted in Carlo Ratti’s pioneering research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the office operates at the intersection of the natural and the artificial, executing interventions across every scale—from bespoke furniture to macroscopic urban planning.
The studio’s portfolio is defined by a commitment to "senseable" environments. Recent milestones include AquaPraça, a centrepiece for the Italian Pavilion at COP30 in Belém; the Mutti Canteen, a circular earthwork topped with a living roof; and the adaptive reuse of Oscar Niemeyer’s Palazzo Mondadori in Milan. CRA is the only firm to have three projects—the Digital Water Pavilion, the Copenhagen Wheel, and Scribit—recognized in TIME Magazine’s “Best Inventions of the Year.” Reflecting his influence on the global architectural discourse, Carlo Ratti served as the Director of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.
