yinjispace

INTERIOR
HBM Design
PHOTOGRAPHY
Qin Zhaoliang
EDITOR
Gina
Collection

“Tian jian” is a pitch-black restaurant conceived as an architectural meditation on darkness and light. Sitting on the edge of the city, it uses the most restrained material language—black volcanic stone and black oak—to build a space that feels both weighty and warm, austere yet profoundly pure.

Its façade stands like a silent monolith, revealing a primal heaviness beneath the daylight and shutting the city’s clamor firmly outside. Inside, however, the stage is set for a theater of light and shadow. Staggered square windows and a twelve-meter linear skylight draw natural light in like poetry, carving traces of time into the profound darkness. A black spiral staircase coils around a volcanic-stone column, rising with equal measures of strength and grace, linking the three floors into a unified spatial journey. Here, darkness gives the building its emotion, and light, its visibility.

The designer returns to the essence of architecture, using pure geometric masses as the language of space. Light enters through carefully placed openings, sketching shifting patterns on walls and floors. As day turns to night, the rhythm of the space subtly changes. Geometry becomes more than a container for function—it becomes the grammar of emotion, allowing architecture to transcend matter and enter the realm of spirit.

Private courtyards are placed in the VIP rooms on the second and third floors. Enclosed by tall walls, illuminated by side windows, with shadows moving as wind stirs the trees, diners can feel the seasons passing in silence. These courtyards function like the “blank spaces” in Song-dynasty landscape paintings, or the mysterious aesthetics of In Praise of Shadows—where light gains depth through concealment and space breathes through shadow. They are “micro-cosmoses” crafted by the designer, opening a quiet refuge for the soul amid the noise of the city.

The project features all-black chairs made of wood and leather, blending the stillness of the East with the modern spirit of the West. The forms are minimal, the lines restrained; they serve as quiet footnotes extending the order of the architecture to the scale of the human body. For the designer, “A chair is where architecture truly begins”—architecture only starts to work when someone sits. The spiral staircase, the geometric volumes, the volcanic stone—they are the grand narrative of the space. The chair brings everything back to the intimate acts of sitting, eating, talking, thinking.

Though this is a restaurant—where function, operation, and circulation must all run efficiently—the designer refuses to let it become a mere commercial product. The roughness of volcanic stone, the warmth of black oak, the sculptural presence of the spiral staircase, the blankness of the courtyards—together, these elements give the space an artistic temperament. Here, commerce and art are no longer opposites; poetry and pragmatism coexist, shaking hands within the architecture.

As we walk into the space—seeing the spiral staircase illuminated, watching shadows drift in the courtyards, witnessing geometric volumes shift between light and dark—we begin to understand: architecture has never been about form, but about time.

Here, light gains the weight of time; darkness gains the depth of space. Geometry, courtyard, chair, commerce—every thread ultimately points to the moment when architecture encounters the soul.

In that moment, time folds, and architecture comes alive. As the poem says:“The night gave me its black eyes, and with them, I search for light.”

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