Ama town hall wins Good Design Award for community-built circular space

A project to build a new town hall in Ama, a remote town in the Oki Islands, has won a 2025 Good Design Award for its community-led and circular approach to public architecture. The “Ama Maru” project transformed the building’s first floor into a co-creation space using upcycled materials, turning what the town calls the “constraints of a remote island into creativity.”

The spatial design was handled by the Oki Circular Design Lab, a project team from the design firm Godo Kaisha wawawa. The lab worked with the local government and residents to create the “Future Co-creation Space Shabariba.” This project was guided by Ama Town’s traditional “Naimono wa nai” philosophy, meaning to make do with what one has, and “Shozen-keigo,” which means learning from the past to create the future.

In a series of workshops, residents, local craftspeople, and children helped collect and remake locally sourced waste. The project gathered approximately 360 discarded pieces of furniture and 80 kilograms of old clothing. These materials, along with construction waste and marine plastic debris, were transformed into new furnishings. Items created include patchwork chairs with seats made from old jeans, counters, tiles made from ocean plastic, and a furniture layout named the “Ama Maru Ship.” The process design created a space where the relationship between people and resources is circular.

The Good Design Award jury praised the project for reimagining a public building. “A distinctive feature is the design of the new town hall not merely as a place for administrative functions, but as a ‘place of co-creation’ that reflects the island’s values,” the jury’s evaluation comment stated. “The flexible design of this public space, which turns the constraints of a remote island to its advantage, serves as a reference for the future of government offices.”

The Oki Circular Design Lab stated that the process of creating new furniture with the community formed the core of the design. “This challenge was an opportunity to prove that ‘creativity is born from a limited environment’,” the lab commented. “We will continue to promote design from the island that reweaves the relationship between resources and people.”