Architectures and Ecologies of Amazonia

Architectures and Ecologies of Amazonia: Friday, February 7, 2025, 9am–7:30pm / University of Pennsylvania, Kleinman Energy Forum, Fisher Fine Arts Library Building, 4th Floor, 220 South 34th Street, Philadelphia / Free and open to the public, registration is required. RSVP here.

Architectures and Ecologies of Amazonia is an interdisciplinary international symposium and exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania highlighting the agencies that have shaped and are shaped by Amazonia. Threatened by deforestation, fire, and drought, the Amazon rainforest, which spans nine countries, is home to more than thirty million people. It is the ancestral homeland of more than one million Indigenous peoples and sustains the greatest concentration of biodiversity on Earth. In the face of the widespread socio-environmental challenges we currently face, along with the existential threat of crossing the environmental tipping point of the Amazon rainforest, the symposium aims to share lessons that the study of the Amazon can teach us about climate action, coexistence, and the built environment. 

Due to its vastness and status as the last large contiguous tropical rainforest, Amazonia offers a unique lens through which to examine the narratives of the Anthropocene and the critiques surrounding them in contemporary socio-environmental justice debates. Architectures and Ecologies of Amazonia will consider the past, present, and future of the built environment, focusing on the diversity and coexistence of lives and experiences in the forest, both within and beyond the contexts of the Americas, Latin America, and the Global South.

The symposium seeks to promote interdisciplinarity by considering different approaches to the relationship between nature and culture for contemporary definitions of design, architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and the notion of the built environment itself, guided by the socio-ecological practices, agriculture, thought, and activism that the discussion of the Amazon rainforest can foster. Indigenous peoples, along with the archaeologists and anthropologists who work critically with them, emphasize that the Amazon is a cultural landscape that has been manipulated, gardened, designed, and even urbanized for centuries. Climate activist, educator, and Amazonian Indigenous leader Vanda Witoto (Instituto Witoto) and philosopher Emanuele Coccia (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) are the symposium’s keynote speakers. Other speakers include anthropologists Carolina Angel Botero (Penn), Clark Erickson (Penn, Professor Emeritus), Kristina Lyons (Penn), Glenn H. Shepard Jr. (Princeton University), ethnobotanist William Balée (Tulane University), the head of climate negotiations at the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Túlio Andrade, architect and theorist Fernando Luiz Lara (Penn), landscape architect Catherine Seavitt (Penn), architect and historian Vanessa Grossman (Penn), architect, author and educator Paulo Tavares (University of Brasília), Amazonian architect Isabella de Bonis (University of São Paulo and Núcleo Arquitetura Moderna na Amazônia-NAMA), literary critic Rodrigo Simon de Moraes (Princeton University), Amazonian filmmaker Priscilla Brasil (University of Coimbra), psychoanalyst Marcio José de Araujo Costa and the dean and Paley Professor of the Weitzman School of Design Fritz Steiner (Penn). The symposium will be moderated by Penn graduate students Dagny Elise Carlsson, Clarisse Figueiredo de Queiroz, and Marco Salazar Valle.

Key topics for discussion will include lessons on enhancing ecological diversity through both human and more-than-human forms of construction; forest management, politics, and globalization; water and the creation of soil (such as terra preta); biodiversity and vernacular environments; as well as cosmology, mythology, cohabitation, and solidarity. These themes will be explored through a critical examination of ancestral and Indigenous cosmologies and forest practices, alongside human and life sciences as well as aesthetics that have shaped critiques of colonialism, governance, and resource extraction. Such discussions will also engage with the intertwined histories of coloniality, development policies, urbanization, modernization, and industrialization—forces that have displaced countless beings and triggered environmental destruction, including habitat loss, species extinction, and significant shifts in the global climate.

Architectures and Ecologies of Amazonia is co-presented by the Department of Architecture (Rossana Hu, Miller Professor and chair), the Department of Landscape Architecture (Catherine Seavitt, Meyerson Professor of Urbanism and chair), and The Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design. The symposium is organized by Vanessa Grossman, Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, and Catherine Seavitt in collaboration with Fernando Lara, Professor, Department of Architecture, and Kristina Lyons, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania Department of Anthropology. A parallel exhibition of student work will be held in the Mezzanine Gallery of Meyerson Hall from February 7 through May 1, 2025. The exhibition is designed by Penn graduate architecture students Jonathan Bonezzi and Ryan Lane. 

The symposium has been made possible through the generous support of several key programs and initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, including the Perry World House International Visitors Grant Program, the Penn Global Convening Grant, and contributions from the Department of Anthropology, the Center for Experimental Ethnography, the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies, and the Native American & Indigenous Studies at Penn. The symposium is organized in partnership with the Faculty of Technology at the Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM) and the Núcleo Arquitetura Moderna na Amazônia (NAMA).