Location: Hiroshima, Japan

Design Team: SUEP. + Tomoki Nagase Architects

Area: 589.6 m²

Year: 2025

Photography: Kai Nakamura

Design Features: MORI no KI TERRACE occupies a former visitor car park within the Hiroshima Prefectural Government complex. Working through a public-private partnership, SUEP. and Tomoki Nagase Architects replaced an inward-looking administrative leftover with two single-storey timber pavilions, lawns, shaded paths and permeable spaces beneath the eaves. The intervention stays low and retains or relocates existing trees, allowing an everyday civic landscape to emerge rather than imposing a new monumental object.

The two buildings are placed around the renewed prefectural forest, leaving several routes between the street, lawns, covered passages and internal grounds. Cafes, dining and retail spaces open directly onto these semi-outdoor areas. A precinct once visited mainly for official business now supports lunch breaks, walks, meetings and small events, while mature canopies rise above the roofs and keep pedestrian life in the foreground.

A business term of roughly twenty years shaped the construction strategy. The project uses the SE timber system with deliberately simple connections so that components can eventually be dismantled, relocated or reused. Following Japan’s 2019 building-code revision, it is designed as a fire-spread-prevention building within a fire district: walls, soffits and openings meet the required performance while columns and beams remain exposed through charring allowance design.

Local materials connect the prefectural centre to production across Hiroshima. Vertical louvers use timber from the prefecture, while paving, concrete benches and planters incorporate crushed oyster shells recovered after local production and consumption. Display niches beneath the eaves introduce Hiroshima crafts and industrial products, bringing forestry, marine by-products, making and commerce into one public setting.

For a traveller, the project is best read as an urban repair rather than a single architectural image. Trees, low roofs, grey paving and continuous eaves extend the walk around Hiroshima Castle into the government grounds. MORI no KI TERRACE turns a time-limited development into a civic prototype that is demountable, materially circular and open to daily use.

Design Team: SUEP. was founded by architect Yoko Suemitsu in 2003 and is now led with Hirokazu Suemitsu from offices in Tokyo and Fukuoka. The practice explores coexistence between nature and architecture, translating studies of wind, heat, light and material cycles into spatial and structural decisions. Hirokazu Suemitsu studied at the University of Tokyo and worked for Toyo Ito & Associates; Yoko Suemitsu graduated from Hiroshima University and worked at AXS SATOW. The studio’s work spans housing, education, culture, public space and urban renewal, and has received the Yoshioka Award, the Yoshinobu Ashihara Award and a Good Design Gold Award.

Tomoki Nagase Architects was established in 2023. Nagase completed a doctorate in design and architecture at Nagoya City University, joined SUEP. in 2015 and became a partner in 2018 before beginning his independent practice. His work considers human use alongside the wider ecology of a site, seeking architecture that enriches not only its occupants but also surrounding plants, animals and environmental systems. MORI no KI TERRACE builds on that environmental-design experience and received a 2025 Good Design Award.