Advisor: João Masao Kamita
Dissertation: Imagination on water: Essays about architecture and the planet
Defense date: 26/05/2021
Abstract
Starting from a mainly philosophical bias about the so-called ecological
crisis, characterized by the dramatic and unprecedented changes in the
biogeochemical processes of the Earth, this dissertation investigates the
repercussions of this new context in the ontology of Architecture. The new
geological era in which we are today, the Anthropocene, calls into question the
validity of the Western epistemological division, which for more than five
centuries has distinguished culture from nature, as it also requires approaches that
integrate the history of the planet with the history of globalization. How to
theorize a fundamentally anthropocentric architecture, as well as its history, when
such problems appear? Despite the temporal rupture that the new era establishes,
the “carbon modernity” still persists when considering not only how we build
cities, but also how we produce and consume things. In practice, architecture,
while it participates in this chain of extraction of planetary resources and feeds
commercial exchanges across the globe, reiterates a political character that goes
beyond its disciplinary limit. Architecture legitimizes the current modes of
production and consumption, and if the Anthropocene requires ways of life other
than those dominated by the “carbon form”, it will be necessary to recognize the
problem in order to conjecture an alternative logic.