forest city : a generation of cara in amazon

Pedagogical Experience

data . 2018-2024

Following the academic experiences of architecture studios in partnership with indigenous communities at the School of Architecture at City College (CUNY), Escola da Cidade in São Paulo, and Columbia University, NY, Forest City Studio organizes a series of studios focused on indigenous issues at AAP, Cornell University. Together with indigenous communities in Brazil and the United States, these studios counter the systematic silencing that obscures the indigenous presence within our educational spaces and, in doing so, recognize their historical existence and the current importance of their sophisticated epistemology.

By establishing and strengthening spaces for interaction between different worldviews, this pedagogical initiative presents itself as a space for the critical analysis of architectural practice itself, proposing new perspectives on issues such as climate change and ideas of progress. Studio Forest City motivates students to explore through design new spatial, material and programmatic solutions to create scenarios that deconstruct the distance between what is “nature” and what is “human”, or “urban”. In establishing the place of “otherness” as a premise for design creativity it opens new perspectives for modern problems, especially regarding the current socio-environmental crisis.

ForestCity:Xingu (2021)
in partnership with the Yudjá People (Xingu, Brasil)

Studios always begin with a research and engagement phase, when we visit the “expanded sociocultural context” of the partner community. Through readings, discussions, interaction with community representatives and research, students are guided to question the ideological premises embedded in the process.
Little by little, they begin to uncover the colonizing values inherent in what they learn, turning to creative graphic and spatial interpretations as tools of expression that reveal a new understanding, a new subjectivity. In this phase, pictorial, spatialized representation induces the need for subjective synthesis and the reconceptualization of the themes presented, also leading to the questioning and expansion of architectural language and its modes of representation.

ForestCity:Salamanca (2022)

with the Seneca Indigenous Nation (NY, US)

ForestCity:Onondaga (2023)
with the Onondaga Nation (NY, US)

Following the process of engagement and critical analysis, students propose spaces and design strategies guided by their interpretation of the sociocultural reality in which the community is inserted, as well as by the questions the partner community itself poses. Thus, the resulting projects become means to mediate between architectural practice as we understand it today and the historical and current values manifest by the community, presenting themselves as a hybrid where two subjectivities can meet.
Concepts such as the integration between “built-and-natural”, notions of circular temporality, territories not fragmented by individual property, non-coercive decision-making systems and gender equity merge with practices arising from the daily lives of the partner communities (or their aspirations to rescue dormant practices) to guide design decisions. In this process of attempting to balance different sensibilities, space is opened for design proposals that are rooted within a territory where the “traditional and the modern” meet.