Hiroaki Yamane (Year: 2)

The moment I encountered Venetian children playing football using the passage gate as a goalpost, I started to look at the relationship between the objects and their intrinsic meanings. This can be seen as mitate - 見立て - the act of modelling one object upon other objects; for children with limited playground space in Venice, "Gate = Goalpost". The gate has multiple layers of meanings, hence the superimposition of associations. Coming back from Venice I constructed my definition of PLOT as follows; By observing the visual and experiential superimpositions, it dissects the overlooked layers of ingredients. The found elements become the basis for mitate to design for the new meanings. With the definition of PLOT, I looked at the river-side in London, Queenhithe by observing the site at different levels of scale; from a single pebble of the foreshore that reveals the chaotic pattern of gradient caused by tides, to the city scale encompassing the context of the site. The site is currently under development for the business hotel that bluntly overlooks the rich and multi-faceted qualities of the waterfront. As my polemical response to the ongoing hotel development, I proposed my take on the hotel to present the foreshore not as the amenity for hotel's dining space, but truly as the public space open to everyone suggesting more meanings and activities beyond mudlarkers and stone-skippers. The project hopes to look to the void as the gateway for bringing the water back to Londoners, in order for us to become aware of the importance of the void amid busy cityscape.