Beyond District Palettes: A Component-Relational Framework for Historic-Building Color Assessment in Dalian, China

Historic-district maintenance and repainting may preserve familiar colors while altering relationships among roofs, facades, and architectural accents. Conventional palette surveys identify which colors occur but provide limited information about their component assignment and relational structure. This study develops a component-relational framework integrating architectural assignment, directional color differences, and recurring building-level configurations. The framework was applied to 153 selected historic buildings in Dalian, China; 149 complete roof–facade–accent cases were analyzed using normalized image-derived descriptors in CIELAB/CIELCh, CIEDE2000 color differences, repeated-measures tests, and exploratory clustering. The components occupied a shared warm-to-neutral gamut. Facades were generally lighter, whereas chroma showed no consistent ordering. Within the standardized dataset, roof–facade separation was lower than both roof–accent and facade–accent separation, while similar overall magnitudes arose from different combinations of lightness, chroma, and hue. Five overlapping configurations represented recurring relational centers rather than discrete styles. This study contributes a transferable component-relational method that extends palette inventories into comparative accounts of architectural color structure, supporting more precise analysis of historic-district color conservation.