Capucine Gougenheim Geagea
In Seoul, the Audeum Audio Museum, designed by Kengo Kuma, has been honored with the 2025 Versailles Prize
The audio museum designed by Kengo Kuma was recently honored last December with the 2025 Versailles Prize as one of the most beautiful museums in the world. This international recognition, under the auspices of UNESCO, celebrates both the building’s unique architecture and the visitor experience it offers.
The Audeum Audio Museum has cemented its place among the year’s most notable cultural institutions.
The audio museum, which opened in June 2024, has not only just been honored with the 2025 Versailles Prize, but has also received the Interior Design Award, as one of seven museums selected worldwide, alongside the Grand Palais in Paris, among others.
This recognition highlights the exceptional quality of the museum’s interior spaces, at a time when cultural architecture is increasingly evaluated based on the experience it offers visitors.
Designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, who seeks to establish new relationships between nature, technology, and human beings, the Audeum Audio Museum is part of this new generation of spaces where form does not seek to dominate, but to accompany.
This distinction comes at a time when the Prix Versailles has recently expanded its scope to include museums, reflecting a shift in the criteria for architectural excellence. The focus is no longer solely aesthetic, but also cultural and social.
The Audeum Audio Museum embodies this approach by offering a program centered on listening: a permanent exhibition, immersive installations, and events explore the relationship between the external and internal worlds, sensations, acoustics, memory, and space.
Audeum is reinventing the museum experience through sound
Audeum does more than simply showcase sound: it listens to it, lets it flow, and breathe. Here, architecture becomes an instrument in its own right. Aluminum and wood form a soft, porous shell, permeated by natural light and air, giving sound its rightful place.
Nothing is ostentatious. The building blends into the landscape with an almost meditative restraint.
Inside, the spaces are designed to encourage listening, slowing down, and mindfulness.
The visitor’s path is not imposed: it is discovered, adapts, and sometimes even pauses.
True to his approach, Kengo Kuma creates a space where the boundary between interior and exterior gently dissolves, inviting the visitor to open themselves up, to awaken their senses as well as their inner vision.
The Interior Award specifically recognizes this ability to create a dialogue between space, material, and perception. At Audeum, the interior design is not limited to scenography; it plays a full part in the museum’s mission. Visitors are not guided by effects, but by a succession of atmospheres that invite an intimate and personal relationship with sound.
In the exhibition halls, sound becomes a living material. The permanent exhibition Jeong-eum: The Journey of Sound offers an immersive journey that has already been acclaimed by thousands of visitors.
Lectures, guided listening sessions, and special programs extend this attentive engagement with sound, far removed from any form of fast consumption.
Audeum thus establishes itself as a place for pause and contemplation, where the architecture protects as much as it reveals. A museum conceived not as a static monument but as a place that challenges and invites personal exploration for the ear, the body, and the mind.
By receiving the Interior Award from a highly competitive international selection, Audeum stands out as an example of a contemporary museum where architecture becomes a true tool for mediation and reflection.
More than just a place to visit, the museum presents itself as a space to experience, focused on emotions and taking one’s time.
A stationary journey, as Plume likes to describe it.
Photo credits © Taiki Fukao © Yongbaek Lee © Namsun Lee
Audeum Audio Museum
6 Heolleung-ro 8-gil, Seocho District
Seoul, South Korea
Tel: +82 2-574-5175
