Project Name: Suzunami Sakae Mori Underground Shopping Street Store

Location: Nagoya, Japan

Design Team: Yasutaka Yoshimura Architects + Nano Architects

Total Floor Area: 110.87 m² (including kitchen 22.22 m²)

Completion: September 2024

Lead Architects: Yasutaka Yoshimura, Atsumi Nonaka, Yuki Mitani

Photography: ToLoLo studio

 Feature: Japanese architects Yasutaka Yoshimura and Nano have transformed a challenging underground retail space in Nagoya into an atmospheric dining destination, using impossibly thin curved steel walls and an innovative ceiling design to create an elegant spatial experience beneath the city streets.

Located in the Mori underground shopping complex in Nagoya's rapidly developing Sakae district, the Suzunami restaurant occupies an exceptionally narrow footprint measuring over 21 meters in width but just five meters in depth. This elongated proportion presented significant design constraints that the architects turned into distinctive architectural features.

The defining element is a boundary wall constructed from steel plates just six millimeters thick, curved and varied in height to disrupt the typical rigid geometry of underground retail spaces. Rather than following the straight lease lines common to such locations, the undulating metal surface creates an ambiguous threshold between interior and exterior, its gentle curves generating depth and shadow play through carefully choreographed relationships with existing structural elements and lighting fixtures. The bending technique employed also serves a structural function, providing optimal vibration damping properties in what the architects describe as an integrated design approach.

Addressing the technical challenges inherent to subterranean spaces, where air conditioning and lighting requirements are particularly demanding, the design team developed an ingenious coved ceiling solution. All necessary equipment, from air vents to inspection hatches, is concentrated on the raised portion of the ceiling, leaving the lower surface entirely free of mechanical interruptions. This strategic organization allows for an unbroken, refined horizontal plane that complements the rhythmic metal wall panels.

The floor employs a specialized terrazzo finish requiring no expansion joints, eliminating unnecessary lines that would conflict with the regular seams visible in the metal wall cladding. Together, these carefully coordinated elements produce what the architects describe as a premium spatial quality rarely achieved in underground commercial environments, transforming functional constraints into architectural opportunities.

Design Team: Founded in 2005, Yasutaka Yoshimura Architects is a Tokyo-based architecture and urban design practice that has established itself as an innovative force in contemporary Japanese architecture. Led by principal architect Yasutaka Yoshimura, who concurrently serves as Professor at Waseda University, the firm approaches design challenges by transforming regulatory constraints, market forces, social norms, and environmental conditions into generative design opportunities rather than limitations.

The practice's methodology, informed by Yoshimura's formative experience at MVRDV in Rotterdam from 1999 to 2001, demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between architecture and its contextual frameworks. This approach has garnered significant recognition, including multiple Annual Prizes from the Architectural Institute of Japan for projects such as Fukumasu Base and Nakagawa Office, the JCD Design Award Grand Prix for Red Light Yokohama, and the prestigious Yoshioka Prize.

Yoshimura's dual role as practitioner and educator shapes the office's research-driven design ethos, examining how architectural intervention can respond to complex urban conditions. The firm's body of work spans diverse typologies from commercial interiors to residential projects, consistently revealing underlying spatial possibilities within seemingly restrictive situations. Through publications including Behaviors and Protocols and Super Legal Buildings, the practice articulates its theoretical position on architecture's engagement with contemporary regulatory and social landscapes.