[Faculty of Architecture & Art] Student's graduation design wins Jury Prize at "Diploma×KYOTO '25"!

The graduation design of Takumi Akira, a fourth-year student in the Faculty of Architecture and Art (as of March 2025), won the Jury Award at the off-campus exhibition "Diploma×KYOTO '25."

"Diploma×KYOTO" is the largest joint graduation design exhibition in the Kansai region, organized by the Kyoto Architecture Students Association and run for 34 years.
The event is usually held over three days in February, with a panel of Architecture on hand to display more than 150 outstanding works from each university.
Akira proposed Architecture that blends in with the sugar cane landscape and won the Jury Prize.

[Summary of Akira Takumi's graduation project]
Tokunoshima (Kagoshima Prefecture) is located in a typhoon-prone area and its livelihood is sugarcane. In the past, rice was the mainstay of the local economy, but the rice production reduction policy of 1973 led to a shift to sugarcane.
As a result, farmland development projects were carried out, and the landscape changed along with the changes in the topography. The cause of the change in the landscape is not only the occupation, but also closely related to the lack of successors due to the declining population. In Setahara, Tokunoshima, most households have no successors.
Based on this analysis, this project proposes turning a space unique to Tokunoshima, located within the present-day Setahara, into a museum, and envisions how to preserve the houses, land, and landscape.

[Student comments]
We received a lot of criticism from the judges.
Although the evaluation was harsh, the answer (proposal) that I came up with was evaluated as having potential and being very interesting, which made me very happy. I could never have won this award on my own.
I was able to win the award thanks to my Lecturer, my seniors, juniors, and my family who all cooperated with me in this project. Similarly, the content I proposed could not have been achieved by me alone. I realized that the process of my graduation project leading up to the award and my proposals going forward are directly connected.

I hope that this experience will help him achieve even greater success in the future.

(Source: School Public Relations)