Most observation towers built in the twentieth century want you to think about outer space. Seattle has the Space Needle. Berlin has a giant silver sphere. When mid-century cities poured thousands of tons of concrete into the sky, they usually capped it with a UFO.
So when you stand at the base of Dragon Head Mountain in Busan and look up at the white stalk of Busan Tower, you might assume you are looking at another retro-futuristic spaceship. But you aren’t looking at the cosmos. You’re looking at the eighth century.
Look closely at the observation deck capping that pillar. It doesn’t have the sleek, aerodynamic lines of a flying saucer. It has layered, gently curving roofs—more like a temple crown than a space capsule. The architect, Na Sang-gi, wasn’t trying to make Busan look like the future. He designed a modern tower whose top echoes the form language of an old stone pagoda.
The touchstone people point to is Dabotap: an impossibly delicate, twelve-hundred-year-old Buddhist pagoda from the Silla period. If you happen to have a ten-won coin in your pocket, pull it out. That intricately carved stone tower on the coin is Dabotap.
That’s the move: take something sacred, ancient, and painstaking—and translate it into stark white, twentieth-century concrete. Even the tower’s central shaft reads like an exaggerated version of the pagoda’s vertical core: a spine running straight up through the middle, carrying you—submarine screens and all—into the roofline.
And it matters where they planted it. This hill had been scraped and remade again and again: leveled for a colonial shrine, scarred by war, crowded with makeshift homes, and later cleared after fire. It wasn’t neutral ground.
So putting a pagoda-shaped crown up here wasn’t just decoration. In the early 1970s, the state was pushing modernization so hard it risked snapping the country’s sense of itself. The regime leaned heavily on older, unifying symbols—especially Silla, the kingdom that had once stitched the peninsula together—and elevated them into civic monuments.
When you stand under the tower today, you can feel that tension in the shape. The city is all motion—traffic, port noise, concrete, commerce. And above it, suspended in the air, is a roofline that insists on continuity. Not a spaceship. A pedestal, topped with a carefully engineered reminder of a golden age, asking the people below to look up and see the past looking back.
