What lies in the human unconscious that is released in dreams, forgotten by morning and manifests itself in myths? How are the archetypes of the human condition transferred to land in the form of memory and rituals? Set within our current context ' an environment ruled by the commoditisation of property ' Intermediate 3 searches for the idea of the mythical within land ownership, exploring architecture as a time-based occupation rather than a container of space.
We located these conditions during our travels to Sri Lanka, a country severed by 30 years of civil war, with a coastline washed away by the catastrophic 2004 tsunami and an urban economy of new large-scale developments bankrolled by foreign capital. In this multi-layered scenario the students investigated their own ideas of land archetypes - Promised Land, Cursed Land and Wonderland - working between large drawings and test prototypes. Drawings were initially used for investigations and as a way of evidencing intuition, clues, analyses and findings. Later they were used to comprehensively present the final proposal, which while utilising both approximation and precision was also always a rigorous exercise of the imagination.
By analysing the current postwar military condition Nicholas Zembashi proposed ‘Insidious Colossus’, a project where the human body is both a building and an ever-unfinished monument made of melted military machinery and filled with surprising urban functions. Both Assaf Kimmel and Nathan Su investigated the new investment boost in the capital of Colombo with the first proposing a radical alternative in the form of a hollow, mixed-ownership mountain and the second empowering citizens with a new system of participating in urban development utilising AR to influence the city fabric. In these projects and others the students of Intermediate 3 discovered new ways of looking at the status quo of ownership, using modern technologies, ancient myths and most important, people and their stories, to reveal the unwritten value of land.
Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos are principals of NaJa & deOstos. They are the authors of The Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad and Pamphlet Architecture 29: Ambiguous Spaces. They have been nominated for the 2012 Iakov Chernikhov prize for young architects around the world. Nannette has worked for Wilkinson Eyre and Zaha Hadid. Ricardo has worked for Peter Cook, Future Systems and Foster + Partners. He has taught at Lund University in Sweden and is currently an Associate Professor at École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris. He was appointed curator of the Brazilian Pavilion for the London Festival of Architecture in 2008 and 2010.
