In an alley in Sinsa-dong, Gangnam, Seoul stand two multi-family houses built in the mid-1990s. Four years ago they were a month away from demolition. Today the two are joined into one building and charge adults 27,000 won for a ticket.
1.Gaudí: Reborn in Seoul opened on 1 August at 27 Gangnam-daero 162-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul. It closes on 31 October, so it runs 91 days. The site is an alley behind Garosu-gil, and the building is called Sinsa House.
2.Open daily from 10:00 to 20:00, last entry 19:00. Suggested viewing time is 60 minutes. Tickets sell through Fever at 27,000 won for adults, 22,000 won on weekdays. That is the price a former apartment building now charges.
3.On the register one building has a gross floor area of 431.13㎡, about 130 pyeong. Occupancy was approved in September 1995 and the registered use is Class 2 neighbourhood facility. Two such buildings sit side by side, and the exhibition runs across five floors that link them.
4.What makes that price odd is the location. Cushman & Wakefield measured Garosu-gil's 2025 vacancy rate at 43.9%. That is the highest among Seoul's major retail streets, more than ten times Seongsu. Four of every ten storefronts sit empty, and on that street two multi-family houses started selling tickets.
5.Go back to 2022. A month before the scheduled demolition, Maison Korea leased the whole building. Maison to Maison 2022. Thirty-two rooms went to creators, one each, to furnish in their own taste, and the visitors who came asked for the building to be kept. It held on for three more years. What stopped the demolition was not a preservation campaign but the number of people who bought tickets.
6.Andrew Park, who runs the place, handed the design to Iroje, and preparation and construction took two years. An excavator's grapple broke through the brick facade to cut openings, and parts of the slab came out while red H-beams went in to carry the load again. In the yard between the two buildings a new external steel stair was welded up.
7.The red brick went white, but the cut faces of the openings were left unfilled. Brick courses show through under the paint, and the bolt heads of the new steel stayed in place, painted white. Seung H-Sang describes it as editing time rather than stopping it. Redevelopment erases Seoul's memory fast, he says, so he wanted a space that keeps the marks of having been lived in while still feeling new.
8.Here is where studio-sized rooms turn from a defect into an asset. This exhibition needs seven themed spaces, and in a white cube you would build partition walls to make rooms and tear them out at the end. Here the rooms were already standing. There are more than 30 of them and the ceiling heights all differ. Original material that needs low light suits a small, low room, while a projection that takes a whole wall needs the height gained by removing a slab. Forty-two authorised reproductions and media art by NAKED are distributed across that variation.
9.What left Garosu-gil first was not the tenants but a reason to stay. Online took the reason to go buy clothes, and coffee is everywhere. A business that holds someone for 60 minutes and charges twenty-odd thousand won for it works in that gap.
10.Split by floor and let out as shops, one building brings in around 18 million won a month, so 36 million won a month for the two. That assumes 300,000 won per pyeong on the ground floor, the going Garosu-gil rate, with upper floors and the basement set far below it (estimates from here on).
11.The question is whether that money actually comes in. Apply the 43.9% vacancy rate and it drops to around 20 million won a month. The more you slice the floors, the more units go empty, and empty units still owe management fees. It is not that landlords cannot cut rents. Cut them and the building's appraised value follows, so they choose to leave it empty.
12.The exhibition side runs differently. Take the exhibition area of the two buildings and the viewing time, and the ceiling comes to 1,200 people a day. Assume half of that turns up and an average ticket of 20,000 won, and three months brings revenue in the 900 million won range. The figures behind the calculation are in the chart below.
13.What an immersive exhibition pays for space runs around 12 to 15% of ticket revenue. Against the figure above that is 36 to 45 million won a month. It matches or beats a fully let building, and it comes from one tenant on a fixed term. On a street that cannot fill up, that difference is everything.
14.The same exhibition drew more than 330,000 people through Tokyo and Osaka. The content is already sold goods, and what Seoul tested is the container. Can you rent a multi-family house in an alley instead of building a permanent hall on museum scale? So far the answer is that there is no reason you cannot.
15.The exhibition ends in three months, though. Two years of construction cost cannot be recovered in three, and the value of this building is set by the next tenant. A building with more than 30 rooms left standing and ceiling heights all over the place sells to the next content for the same reason. Value that would have vanished had it been flattened into a white cube.
16.An exhibition opened a month before demolition bought time, and after two years of work that multi-family house sells tickets. On a street with a 43.9% vacancy rate, one tenant filling the whole building on a fixed term is the whole play. To run a ticketed exhibition permanently in a neighbourhood facility you have to convert it to a culture and assembly facility, and escape stairs and parking counts arrive with it. This building has three parking spaces on record.