CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati responds to Seoul’s flood risk not by building the ground up, but by lifting the entire tower off it. Developed with South Korean construction firm GS E&C, the 140-meter (459-foot) Climate Adaptive Tower rests on slender stilts the studio calls “high heels,” opening the site below to water, vegetation, and daily public life. The ground, rather than the tower, becomes the project’s real subject.
Turin-based CRA, founded by Carlo Ratti — also a professor at MIT and Politecnico di Milano — designed the tower’s reduced footprint specifically to preserve the site’s existing trees while creating new public space at ground level. Rather than sealing the plot with a conventional building footprint, the structure keeps the terrain open and permeable beneath it.
Water, not concrete, drives the plan. During heavy rainfall, stormwater is captured and slowed on-site, moving through the landscape before reaching Seoul’s drainage infrastructure — a sponge city approach that treats water as a resource to manage within the urban ecosystem, rather than a problem to remove.
The open terrain doubles as daily life. Gardens and social spaces link the tower to its surroundings, forming an open-air courtyard at the scale of the block; daylight reaching beneath the elevated structure supports shared facilities including a community farm, dining lounges, and tea houses.
A fire-code requirement becomes a garden. Korean regulations mandate a refuge floor every 30 storeys; CRA distributes these safety levels through the building as elevated shared gardens, giving mandatory space an everyday social function rather than leaving it reserved only for emergencies.
Each façade answers to its orientation. The south-facing elevation carries photovoltaic panels for solar generation, while the east and west sides use vertical louvers to cut low-angle sunlight and prevent overheating — a differentiated envelope rather than one uniform skin wrapped around the tower.
Carlo Ratti frames the reversal directly. “Cities have spent much of the last century trying to make water disappear as quickly as possible,” the CRA founding partner said in a statement released alongside the project. “In Seoul, facing a changing climate, we ask how a tower can give water more time and space.”
Water is a new focus for CRA, following a series of projects that treat high-rise and public infrastructure as connected systems. The studio’s floating AquaPraça served as part of Italy’s COP30 pavilion in Belém, while its digitally fabricated Olympic bivouac for Milano Cortina 2026 applied the same experimental approach to extreme alpine conditions.
That same instinct to blur a building’s edges with public life carries through Ratti’s earlier towers: Singapore’s CapitaSpring threads gardens through a skyscraper’s core, while Shenzhen’s Jian Mu Tower folds urban farming into a vertical structure. Recent work also extends into exhibition design, including the MAE Museum, developed with Italo Rota.
Ratti brings the same climate lens to Venice. As director of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2025, he has pushed similar questions — how buildings might absorb rather than resist environmental pressure — onto an international stage; the Seoul tower applies that same agenda at the scale of a single site.
High heels are a strange image for a residential tower to choose, and CRA doesn’t shy from it: the studio names the stilts directly, letting a domestic, almost fashionable metaphor carry a genuinely technical piece of flood engineering. It’s a small naming choice, but one that keeps the building’s climate logic legible to anyone walking underneath it, tree canopy and all.
Climate Adaptive Tower by CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, in collaboration with GS E&C | Location: Seoul, South Korea — Key materials: photovoltaic panels, vertical louvers