Urara Hatano 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—most recently as a director at an international contemporary art gallery—she has expanded her focus to interior architecture, with a particular interest in reuse and the intersection of art, design, research, and cultural narrative. Looking ahead, she is interested in designing spaces for art exhibits that communicate layered narratives and connect contemporary art with society in exciting, engaging, and imaginative ways.

Thesis Project – “Sonic Urban Landscape” (2025)

The project reimagines 15 Westferry Circus in Canary Wharf—a now-redundant office building—as a multi-purpose cultural facility for sound-based collaboration. The design process began with field recordings and on-site acoustic analyses, which informed the spatial strategy. Spread over eight floors, the facility includes auditoriums, a musical instrument gallery, a public sound park, recording studios, artist residencies, and a rooftop garden.

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.