Royal College of Art
Specialisms: Interior Design / Interior Architecture /
Location: London, United Kingdom
First Name: Urara
Last Name: Hatano
Specialisms: Interior Design / Interior Architecture
Sectors:
My Location: London, United Kingdom
University / College: Royal College of Art
Course / Program Title: Interior Design MA
Urara is a Japan-born spatial designer with a background in art history, curation, and project management, holding Master’s degrees in Art History, Theory and Display from the University of Edinburgh and Interior Design from the Royal College of Art. After a decade working on various art projects, she has expanded her focus to interior architecture, with a particular interest in reuse and the intersection of art, design, research, and cultural narrative.
The project reimagines 15 Westferry Circus in Canary Wharf—a now-redundant office building—as a multi-purpose cultural facility for sound-based collaboration. As an adaptive reuse project, the design highlights often-overlooked aspects of urban life—sound and acoustics—creating “paths” that move vertically and horizontally through the building to form an immersive landscape. These invite people to make and listen to sound. The building’s architectural features—whose form and materiality are inspired by musical instruments—evoke sensations, ephemerality, and the poetry of everyday experience.