Where Shinhan went offscript

The building's facade set the tone before anyone stepped inside. Wrapped in a rippling curtain of curved glass — 320 custom modules across 14 types, the first application of its kind in Korea — the exterior gave the structure an object-like presence amidst Myeongdong's visual density, signalling from the pavement that this was not a branch. Inside, the building was reimagined as a three-floor co-creation ecosystem. The fourth floor became Shinhan's Digital R&D Hub — a forward operating base for the bank's digital and ICT teams, with reception, collaborative lounge, conference rooms, and breakout spaces designed in the language of a technology company rather than a financial institution. The fifth floor became an innovation testbed: a flexible, multi-purpose space for hackathons, seminars, partner workshops, and prototype reviews, anchored by a configurable auditorium surrounded by project rooms of varying scale. The sixth floor opened outward — a co-working space where fintech startups and external partners could embed themselves directly alongside Shinhan's own teams, complete with free workspace, enclosed offices, a library, and social lounge.

The space was named Expace — a compression of Experience and Space — to mark a genuinely new spatial category in Korean banking. The interior language across all three floors drew from a shared material palette of terrazzo, clear glass, reeded panels, and acoustic fabric, with floor-specific shifts in colour temperature and spatial atmosphere calibrated to the distinct working mode of each level. A bank that chose to build its future not by demonstrating innovation, but by practising it.