A Surprise Hides in this Tokyo Parking Garage

In a city as dense as Tokyo, hot spots pop up in the most unexpected places—after all, it's not uncommon to find restaurants in office buildings or under train tracks. 

Architect Nobuo Araki of The Archetype and Harajuku icon Hiroshi Fujiwara have taken the concept further with a series of projects that fuse adaptive reuse with retail.

Their latest collaboration is called the The Park-Ing Ginza, and it's their most underground yet—literally. Located in a parking garage beneath the Sony building in one of the city's most high-end districts, the shop comprises more than 7,500 square feet over two underground levels. 

Visitors to Park-ing Ginza are welcomed by Café de Ropé, a restaurant focused on toast dishes, and record shop Bonjour Records, before they descend to a second level featuring about a dozen retail spaces and galleries.

The space is designed to celebrate the existing parking lot structure, with few architectural interventions—the existing floors were only treated with dust-proof matte clear paint, and the fluorescent lighting is original (though the neon signs are all new). There's also little distinction between shops, a design move inspired by the informal nature of community garage sales. All of the sections are designed to be flexible, constructed with rugged materials that reference the setting.

Before Park-ing, Araki and Fujiwara collaborated on The Pool Aoyama, an abandoned swimming pool near Omotesando station they transformed into a nautical-themed shop. With this latest venture's first successful summer, Park-ing will welcome its second round of installations on September 10, 2016.

The Park-ing Ginza is located at  B3F–B4F Sony Building5-3-1, Ginza, Chuo-Ku, Tokyo,Japan.

Cover photo by Atsushi Fuseya(magnet)