A university can call a building open to the public while leaving its campus routes unchanged. Common Nexus, known as ComoNe, takes a more physical approach. At Nagoya University, a planted roof rises from a green belt, while the main public floor sits below it and connects directly to the subway station.
The facility opened in July 2025 on the Higashiyama Campus. Designed by Tetsuo Kobori Architects for the Tokai National Higher Education and Research System, it brings students, researchers, companies and local visitors into spaces for exhibitions, events, making and work. Its public role is carried by circulation as much as by its program.
Keeping the ground in use
The site lies between Toyoda Auditorium and the Central Library. Rather than treating that open strip as a vacant plot, the design lifts a grass-covered surface over the occupied floors. From above, the roof continues the landscape; at the edges, the lifted ground admits light and air to the level below. The building is both destination and passage through the campus.
That choice has a less visible dimension. In an interview published by Nagoya University, Kobori described a rainwater system that collects runoff from the roof in a reservoir near the station stairs and directs it toward planting. The account presents the project as an attempt to repair disrupted water flow on a former valley site. How well such a system performs over time will depend on operation and maintenance, beyond the architectural gesture.
A commons with a threshold
ComoNe’s most useful question is whether a university building can make research approachable without losing the everyday openness of the ground it occupies. The roof, underground entry and public route make that ambition legible in section, rather than only in a mission statement. Its success will be measured in who actually crosses that threshold and returns.
Project facts: Nagoya University’s introduction to Common Nexus and its interview with Tetsuo Kobori. Featured image: an illustrative photograph by CHUTTERSNAP / Unsplash; it does not depict ComoNe.