Christmas Holiday - Reading the Peninsula Otherwise
A shift away from designing the site as an object and toward reading it as a cultural, visual and experiential condition already in motion.
Learning to see the site as part of a wider cultural and creative landscape.
I began by situating the peninsula within its broader artistic context through the Line Art Walk, mapping existing artworks, underused spaces and informal creative traces across the site. Recognising the peninsula as the endpoint of this cultural route reframed it as a place of arrival, accumulation and quiet continuation rather than a blank territory awaiting intervention. This shifted my thinking from insertion to extension, and encouraged me to imagine sculpture gardens and creative spaces as part of an existing identity rather than new impositions. It also opened up possibilities for collaboration with local schools and the university, positioning the project as something that could be co-authored over time.
Noticing how the site is already framed, and what those frames leave out.
I carried out a public photography analysis using images from social media and image-sharing platforms to understand how the site is commonly represented. Certain views, landmarks and spectacles appeared repeatedly, while other spaces were consistently absent. This revealed that the peninsula is often seen as a backdrop or a vista rather than a place of inhabitation. This insight helped me identify opportunities to design for pause, intimacy and everyday presence rather than just visibility. It became a way of designing against dominant images, creating space for what is usually overlooked or unseen.
Bringing spatial, visual and cultural readings into a single frame.
Alongside these analyses, I developed a diagram of the peninsula as three overlapping identities, commercial, ecological and industrial, and explored how these characters meet, conflict and blend across the site. This helped me understand the peninsula not as a unified whole but as a layered condition shaped by adjacency and tension. I then produced a collaged spread of encounters across the peninsula, using images rather than resolved drawings to capture moments, atmospheres and thresholds. This felt like a way of holding complexity without resolving it too early, allowing the project to remain open and responsive rather than prematurely fixed.
Reflection
These weeks marked a shift in how I related to the site. Instead of trying to define it too quickly, I learned to read it, culturally, visually and spatially, and to let those readings inform the design’s direction. The project became less about proposing and more about responding, less about control and more about attentiveness. This felt like an important change, grounding the work in what already exists while opening space for new forms of inhabitation and encounter to emerge.