A survey on facades of buildings in a hot spring village where a voluntary agreement exists for preserving townscape
Takafumi Inoue, Keiji Kawai and Hiroshi Ueda

A survey was conducted for the facade of the buildings in Kurokawa Spa, a hot spring resort in Kumamoto prefecture located southwest of Japan, where a voluntary agreement for preserving its rural townscape has been developed by the residents’ association. The survey consists of a field research on the color and material of the facade elements, an interview to the owner of the hotels and shops, and a field experiment of subjective evaluation of the facade of the buildings. The relationships between positive and negative evaluation and the attribute of the facade elements were analyzed. Then the results were examined in terms of compliance with the agreement. As a result, most of the elements could be regarded as within the agreement. Yet, with regards to the color, the owners of the hotels and shops often expressed their negative impressions to particular types of the elements such as signboards or modern materials of walls because of their color, as they seemed to have rather common criteria for judgment whether the color matches with the townscape of Kurokawa.