Topics in Arch Theory II: Amazonian Landscapes and Forest Histories of Architecture

This course highlights the agencies that have shaped and are shaped by Amazonia. Threatened by deforestation, erosion, 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 supports the greatest concentration of biodiversity on Earth. The course seeks to promote interdisciplinarity by considering different approaches to the relationship between nature and culture for contemporary definitions of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, biodesign, and the notion of the built environment itself, guided by the socio-ecological and agricultural practices, thought and activism that discussions of the Amazon Rainforest can foster. Indigenous peoples, along with the archaeologists, anthropologists, botanists, planners, and designers who work critically with them, emphasize that the Amazon is a cultural landscape that has been manipulated, gardened, designed, and even urbanized for centuries. “Forest Histories” refers to the collection of case studies that the class examines through primary and secondary sources, drawing on different disciplinary perspectives, colonial and postcolonial narratives that connect the local and the global, the past and the present. Combining methods from architectural and landscape history and theory with plant studies, archaeology, ethnobotany, industrial history, and postcolonial studies, the course focuses on the lessons that the study of the Amazon can teach us about the enhancement of ecological diversity through human and more-than-human construction and vernacular environments, including the phenomenon of the flying river and the construction of soil (the terra preta), as well as lessons in cosmology, mythology, and coexistence. Focusing on global and local histories of architecture and the built environment, urbanization, infrastructure, land “development” and resource extraction (gold, rubber, manganese, iron ore, and timber), the course examines projects at scales that relate the largest tropical rainforest on the planet to other geographies and territories, particularly Pennsylvania and the so-called Rust Belt, formerly the Steel Belt.