Evening Lecture and Book Launch
19 October 2017
Scavengers in Promised Lands
Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos
introduced by Sir Peter Cook
Architecture has never been solely about the industry of building as environmental performance. Most importantly architecture is a projection of past/future cultural desires materialized in spaces, cities and landscapes. In the last decade neoliberal capitalism has aggressively built a global infrastructure to sustain consumerism demand back in capital cities. This inter-national trend has resulted in persistent communities displacement around the world’s generating a loss not only of land as shelter, but as a built environment of collective myths and memory.
Reacting to that contemporary displacement pattern Scavengers in Promised Lands is a provocative architectural exploration of how radical cultural practices and time base spaces enables a new set of architectural responses. For the last ten years Ricardo de Ostos and Nannette Jackowski have led AA Intermediate 3 in the pursue of this question through cities, forests and wastelands. Illustrating their approach, the lecture will presents ten years of AA Inter 3 work with an in depth research on how storytelling, collapsing environments and innovation in design shape a innovative understanding of the built environment. With a photographic documentation of unique places on the Planet Earth Scavengers in Promised Lands explores the gripping power of myth and fiction as radical narratives for imagining the near future of cities and forests.
Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos are principals of NaJa & deOstos and Unit Masters of Intermediate Unit 3 at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. Together they create speculative architectures that envision built and unbuilt projects in shifting environmental and cultural contexts. Utilizing narrative to create a complex context articulation their projects include conceptual designs, interactive installations, exhibitions, alongside their new project for a Mangrove Research Campus in Bangladesh.
In 2012 they were nominated for the Iakov Chernikhov International Prize for Young Architects. Together, they lead workshops and lecture about their work worldwide. They are co-founders of the Planetary City Lab and the authors of The Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad (2007), Pamphlet Architecture 29: Ambiguous Spaces (2008) and Scavengers and Other Creatures in Promised Lands (2017).
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