Intermediate 14 is interested in new hybrid forms of expression and identity, and in the practices of displaced communities: those who have replaced the existing character of their current environment by blending elements of their original culture with that of their host society. This is a survival strategy, and a creative response to living between cultures in search of emplacement. We will observe these practices in communities from Tooting, London to La Chappelle, Paris, as well as by visiting local communities in Sri Lanka who are slowly being replaced by globally influenced micro-communities that have developed hybrid cultural rituals in pursuit of a sense of belonging. Our aim is to define new speculative worlds of architecture that break down the boundary between ‘ourselves’ and ‘the other’. 

We will begin the year by creating an encyclopaedia of hybrid cultural rituals and social practices of displaced communities, organised into categories of circulation, domestication and restriction and gathered from sources not limited to architectural origins or singular geographies. A series of drawing and model-making workshops will follow, allowing us to experiment with alternative ways to represent space, time, movement, symbolism and social structures. 

Finally, we will reimagine existing architectural typologies by positioning ourselves on the fringes of society and establishing an alternate way of recognising the world through social, economic and political exclusion. This will be done by moving beyond the private space of the room and blurring the protective boundaries of the building through thresholds, to redefine the transformational relationship these social structures of duality have on the street and in the city. Our three testing grounds for this approach will be within Tooting, Brixton and Peckham in south London.