R1 commercial building Yeoksam-dong, Seoul workplace

R1 Commercial Building Seoul Workplace

14 October 2026

Architecture: Cho and Partners

Location: Yeoksam-dong, Seoul, South Korea

R1, a commercial building in Seoul

Photos by Yousub Song

R1 — RESTRAINT AT URBAN DENSITY

In Yeoksam-dong, one of Seoul’s densest and most competitive commercial districts, the right posture for architecture is not to compete for attention through exaggerated form or decoration. With R1, Cho and Partners held to the practice’s core manifesto — time, structure, proportion — and established a silent order negotiated with a disordered context.

R1 sits on the corner where a 4-metre main road meets a 4-metre dead-end road. The surroundings are a mixture of ageing residential and commercial buildings, a clutter of competing facades. Rather than assimilate into that noise, we took the emphasis of the front facade as the starting point of the design, giving the building a visual tension against its neighbours. The disadvantage of sitting at the back of a dead-end road was turned to advantage: the front is closed as a single large solid mass, so the building reads as an object clearly separated from what surrounds it.

Each face takes a different attitude according to its condition. The front, where the building is entered, is finished in heavy coloured concrete that declares a solid, sculptural presence. The right flank, by contrast, opens fully as a curtain wall of silver reflective glass in light grey frames.

The two set up a dramatic contrast, closure and openness coexisting within a single structure. A vertical opening cutting across the centre of the front mass gives that severed volume room to breathe, and works as the decisive architectural device mediating between internal circulation and the outward gaze.

Within a restricted site of 294.80 sqm, drawing maximum spatial efficiency while using the permitted floor area ratio of 250 per cent to the full demanded hard decisions. To satisfy a statutory parking requirement of 6.49 spaces, a mechanical parking system of eight spaces was placed in the basement, preventing any loss of leasable area on the first and second floors. The increase in basement volume that this inevitably produced was converted into spatial generosity, a sunken court that brings light and air into what could otherwise have been a bleak underground.

The beauty of a space comes not from the artifice of dressing its surfaces but from the structural necessity of accepting the limits of the site and holding its functions. A clearly articulated frame orders the circulation within and strips away unnecessary explanation.

Built through restrained proportion and the rhythm of repetition, R1 does not assert itself; it becomes a quiet stage that holds the traces of those who occupy it. This building is not a one-off performance but will work as a lasting background, a place whose character emerges naturally within accumulated time.