This is an exterior color planning for a complex of government buildings, halls, libraries, etc., Built on the hills of Onagawa-cho, Miyagi Prefecture, which was severely damaged by the Great East Japan Earthquake. Facilities have been planned to link the residential, hill, and lowland commercial areas in the center of Onagawa City.

When I visited the field survey, the Onagawa station building, which had been prepared in advance, was brightly colored, and the adjacent commercial area was based on dark colors. We felt that there were buildings with different colors in one area. Therefore, in this project, we wanted to create a sense of color uniformity throughout the entire area by extracting the colors used in the surrounding buildings and connecting them together in one building.

In the actual color planning, clear color schemes associated with building styles are created to make it easier to understand the location of each building. The volume of the library protruding horizontally from the mountain side to the sea side is a high brightness color and a large hallway wall appears as a low brightness color that makes you feel calm. High-brightness colors correspond to station buildings, and low-brightness colors correspond to commercial facilities. The colors used for architectural exterior colors are all low-saturation colors. We aimed for a background to make the transition of nature and user activities look vivid bright.

Together with the exterior colors, we examined the color system for signage plans. As the symbolic color of Onagawa City is blue, and there are many dark blue in the warehouses in the surrounding fishing ports, we decided to develop the dark blue named Onagawa Blue, so we use Onagawa Blue as the main sign color and interior accent walls.