The Manaus-Boa Vista Highway (BR-174) seen in a 1983 photograph by José Tabacow (Oscar Bressane Archives / Memorial Botanico Roberto Burle Marx). Cutting through the Amazon to connect the cities of Manaus and Boa Vista, its construction resulted in large-scale deforestation and displacement.
There’s no mistaking the dozens of tropical plants lining the Mezzanine Gallery in Meyerson Hall for simple décor. Part of a multimedia exhibition commissioned by the departments of architecture and landscape architecture to accompany the symposium Architectures and Ecologies of Amazonia, the greenery instead serves as a vivid reminder of the fragility of the world’s largest rainforest. Like Amazonia, the plants’ survival depends on stewardship—the continued care and maintenance of Master of Architecture students Jonathan Bonezzi and Ryan Lane, who also designed and fabricated the installation.
Organized by Vanessa Grossman, an assistant professor of architecture, and Catherine Seavitt, the Meyerson Professor of Urbanism and chair of landscape architecture, in collaboration with Fernando Lara, professor of architecture, and Kristina Lyons, associate professor of anthropology, the February 7 symposium and exhibition was designed to highlight “the agencies that have shaped and are shaped by Amazonia.” It was sparked by a convergence of research interests between Grossman, an architect, architectural historian, and curator from Brazil who is studying the development of company towns in the Amazon, and Seavitt, a former Fulbright fellow in Brazil and a scholar of Roberto Burle Marx, the Brazilian modernist landscape architect and polymath. Both joined the Weitzman faculty in 2023.
Amazonia, the vast rainforest ecosystem covering much of Brazil and parts of eight other South American countries, is increasingly at risk of collapse. Climate change and deforestation are driving the system toward a tipping point, when researchers say the rainforest will transform into a savanna, with manifold consequences for biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and global environmental health. That immediate threat, and the longer tail of natural and cultural transformations projected on the Amazon, framed the context for the symposium.
“This is a crisis moment for the planet,” says Seavitt. “How do we think globally to address it?”
Featuring work by students in Grossman's 2024 architectural history and theory seminar, the exhibition ‘Architectures and Ecologies of Amazonia’ embraces different approaches to the relationship between nature and culture.
In Spring 2024, Grossman taught a history and theory seminar titled “Forest Histories: Architectures of Amazonia,” which she is now teaching in the Spring 2025 semester under the new title “Amazonian Landscapes and Forest Histories of Architecture.” Her hope is 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.” The work students produced in that course in 2024—including theoretical papers as well as maps, art installations, oral history interviews, drawings, and prints—formed the basis for the exhibit in Meyerson Hall. The course also informed the approach to the symposium, which brought together philosophers, environmental activists, anthropologists, botanists, and historians alongside designers and planners.
“Design and landscape are often very isolated from conversations that take place in the humanities,” Grossman says. “It was a joint interdisciplinary effort not just to produce knowledge, but to ask how we can contribute to future investments or really the future of the built environment, both within and beyond the Amazon.”
The organizers received funding support from the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at Weitzman and many organizations across Penn, including the University Research Foundation Conference Grant Program, the Perry World House, Penn Global, the Department of Anthropology, the Center for Experimental Ethnography, the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies at Penn. The organizers also collaborated with the Faculty of Technology of the Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM) and the Núcleo Arquitetura Moderna na Amazônia (NAMA).
However vast and teeming with life, Amazonia was described by both early 19th-century visitors as well as leaders of Brazil’s 20th-century military regime as a type of “demographic void,” effectively erasing not only the millions of Indigenous peoples who lived and continue to live there but also the region’s unparalleled biodiversity. The symposium was designed to center their perspectives.
"My people consider themselves ants," said Vanda Witoto, a climate activist, educator, and Indigenous leader from Brazil who gave one of the symposium's keynotes. "To understand themselves as belonging to nature."
One of the keynotes was delivered, in Portuguese, by Vanda Witoto, a climate activist, educator, and Indigenous leader from the Witoto people who lives in Parque das Tribos, an Indigenous urban neighborhood in Manaus. “My people consider themselves ants to understand themselves as belonging to nature,” she said, explaining that her Indigenous name means “wild ant.” She spoke about organizing Indigenous women as an act of resistance to the forces destroying Amazonia, noting, “It is a daily effort because the city erases our story, our identity, and our memory.”
The second keynote was given by Emanuele Coccia, a philosopher and associate professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Coccia, whose most recent book is Philosophy of the Home: Domestic Space and Happiness, advanced the idea of the Amazon as a city and the fundamental identity of cities as “a set of species that are mutually dependent on each other.”
Grossman, who is teaching her seminar on architecture in Amazonia again this semester, examines the connection between the local and global histories of the built environment in the Amazon and the industrial histories of Pennsylvania. She highlights the role of companies like Bethlehem Steel and U.S. Steel in sponsoring large-scale mining operations in the Amazon, including the company town of Carajás in southern Pará, where she lived as a child. The entanglement of the United States, the Amazon, and resource extraction industries—along with their socio-environmental impacts—resonates deeply with Pennsylvania and the broader Rust Belt, including Henry Ford’s failed rubber plantation venture in the Amazon, Fordlândia.
Seavitt and Grossman are working to transform the proceedings of the symposium into an edited volume. Additionally, Grossman’s proposal for a Penn Global Seminar, which will bring undergraduate students to study in Manaus and other sites in the Amazon in 2027, has been approved by the PGS committee and Penn Global leadership. The significant implications of the changing nature and culture of the Amazon will only become more relevant in the meantime.
“The Amazon,” Grossman says, “is a global concern.”
The Architectures and Ecologies of Amazonia exhibition remains on view through April 30.
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