I never really got Samsung until I was sitting in its R&D center just outside Seoul. Inside this glass-and-concrete monolith sits a beautiful, three-story design library finished entirely in natural oak. It felt like an architectural representation of Samsung—a mix of the ancient and the near future.
Compared to the buildings I’ve frequented at Google or Microsoft—office parks erected during the breathless dotcom expansion—Samsung’s headquarters are decidedly steadfast.
It’s the building that prepares me for what I hear from the design team, an idea that’s echoing in my brain half a year later: “Samsung is a thousand-year company.” So what if it started by selling dried fish and noodles in 1938 before selling its first black-and-white TV in 1969. The vision now is to be the human-centered cultural standard—not just for Korea, where it represents an oft-estimated 20% of the country’s gross domestic product—but the wider world.
Many of us perceive Samsung as a faceless electronics company. But it’s born from a culture of historical design intentionality that simply doesn’t exist in America. And it’s operating with an incredible confidence that it will lead culture through design for generations to come.
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