After forty-five years in Jongno, the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education emptied its old headquarters and moved to Yongsan. The lower floors of the new building were handed over to the public, and the site it left behind has set a 136,000 sqm plan in motion.
1.On 1 April 2026 an opening ceremony was held at 27 Duteopbawi-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul. This is where the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education landed after emptying the Jongno headquarters it had occupied since 1981. Three basement levels, six above ground, 39,937 sqm of floor area.
2.The name came from a public call. Of 3,233 entries, the one chosen was Seoul Education Maru. A maru is the raised floor that joins the inside of a house to the outside. No land was purchased. The site is the former Sudo Girls' High School, which relocated to Sindaebang-dong in Dongjak-gu in 2000, and the remaining lot had been used by the education facilities management office since 2007.
3.From the street, white vertical fins sweep down all six floors. Green tinted glass shows through the gaps, and the base has been emptied down to its columns so that passers by see straight in. What is missing is a fence.
4.The design came out of an international competition in July 2018. Twenty seven entries arrived from seven countries, eighteen Korean teams against nine from abroad. The winner was called FORUM27, a Plaza of Openness and Communication, submitted jointly by W Architects (Lee Won-seok) and design lab (Park Dong-joo). The original schedule called for groundbreaking in October 2019 and completion in November 2021. Work actually began in January 2022 and finished in December 2025.
5.Step inside and the floor drops three levels underground. Six storeys open into a single shaft up to the third floor, and a coffered rooflight drops daylight onto the floor in a grid. One wall is rough stone, and what runs along its foot is a low bookcase.
6.At the bottom of that shaft is a broad timber stair. Not a stair built for climbing but one built for sitting. The treads are shallow and deep. The escalators are pushed to one side, out of the way. The base holds a public service counter, a lounge, a book cafe, an exhibit on the history of Seoul education, and a baby room. The second and third floors carry a 691 seat auditorium and a 360 seat conference hall.
7.What this building added shows up plainly in the numbers. The old Jongno headquarters was built in 1981 for 350 people, and headquarters staff now number 812. Parking went from 120 spaces to 255, and there are 45 meeting rooms. Work seats total 787.
8.Total project cost was 176.7 billion won. Divided by floor area that is 4.42 million won per sqm. Strip it down to construction alone and the figure is 129.9 billion won. Land is not in that number. Had the site not already been in hand, the cost of buying 12,993.8 sqm in the middle of Yongsan would have landed on top of it.
9.The funding split is the more striking part. Only 33 billion won came from the education budget, while the remaining 143.7 billion came from a reserve built up specifically for the move. That reserve traces back to proceeds from selling school sites and closed school land. Land sold off as the school age population shrank turned into a headquarters building.
10.Convert 176.7 billion won into rent and a payback period appears. Take the office floors as roughly 45 percent of the total area, about 18,000 sqm. Prime office rent in the central business district averaged 135,200 won per pyeong per month in the second quarter of 2026, which gives 740 million won a month and 8.8 billion won a year. Divide the project cost by that and you get twenty years. The 45 percent share is an assumption rather than a published figure, and deposits and running costs are left out.
11.The auditorium and conference hall sit on the same arithmetic. Together they hold 1,051 seats. The office runs training sessions and briefings several hundred times a year, and the cost of renting outside halls for those has come indoors. What these two rooms are worth comes down to how often they fill. Whether they open to public bookings, and at what rate, is not yet confirmed.
12.So why leave in the first place. The Jongno headquarters stood inside the heritage protection zone around the Gyeonghuigung palace grounds. However worn it got, extension was blocked and demolition and rebuilding were blocked too. A building sized for 350 held 812, with no regulatory route to more floor area.
13.So the value of this move does not sit in the new building alone. In July 2024 the city announced it would combine the Gyeonghuigung grounds, the National Weather Museum, the Seoul Citizens' University and its depot, and the Donuimun Museum Village into a historic culture park of roughly 136,000 sqm. That is more than ten times Seoul Plaza, which covers 13,207 sqm. The education office site was the last missing piece of that picture, and the confirmed 2026 relocation opened the way to a joint scheme. The park is to be built in stages through 2035.
14.What was opened up outside was taken from the inside. With 812 staff and 787 work seats, there are fewer chairs than people, and staff below director level take free seating with a limit of five consecutive days in the same spot. That is partly the cost of giving the whole base away. The complaint that surfaced right after the move was a shortage of office space, along with a worry that meeting rooms will be converted into offices. Removing the fence, some said, let noise travel upward.
15.Emptying a headquarters used for forty five years cost 176.7 billion won, and that move passed 136,000 sqm of inner city land to the next plan. In the new building the entire base went to the public, and in exchange 812 people sit in 787 seats. Anywhere trying the same thing in Korea runs into running costs before it runs into design. The moment you open the base, cleaning, security and night management attach on a 24 hour basis, and that money appears in no construction budget line and no competition brief. Unless someone decides which account carries the annual cost of the open floors, the door that was opened will quietly close within a few years.