Urban Dream Farm Part 2 Project 2005 Elizabeth Bowra University of Sydney | Australia The urban metropolis is an outward limit, a surface that disconnects and demarcates, while contracting the distance between the private and the public. It operates to privilege the territory of the exterior, while the notional realm of the interior is lost and forgotten. The proposal for the insertion of a predominantly residential complex into the urban surface of central Sydney marked the theoretical possibility of evoking the space of the dark, the hidden and the slow.The research basis for the project was The Divine Comedy, by thirteenth century poet Dante, whose linear journey marked his psychological revelation. Dante’s transformation from his time in Inferno, to his journey’s conclusion in Paradiso, defines the brief for the design project - a three part brief that responds to the shifting conditions of light, programme and tectonics. The brilliance of Bowra's project lies in the hold its author has maintained over the many and varied strands of thought and investigation identified and elaborated by her throughout its gestation. Reacting to a current local architectural tendency that assumes the virtue of transparency, the project postulates a critical architecture of the Opaque, and by extension of the Unconscious. Following a sequence of beautifully crafted conceptual models and full scale maquettes the final proposals weave an almost somnabulist line between the whimsical, the outlandish and the decidedly realiseable. The result is a tribute to the authors skill and the potential of the architectural project as tool for critical thought and creative production.