Desenhar paisagens e fazer mundos : por um desenho situado e relacional para vivermos juntos em uma terra devastada.

Abstract

As news about the climate crisis accumulates, the urgency of thinking about alternatives and rethinking our modern way of life becomes evident. Does architectural design offer something? More than that, could architectural design contribute to mitigate the climate, environmental and civilizational crises? Starting from a provocation by the anthropologist Arturo Escobar who states: “the environmental crisis is a crisis of design”, this thesis is rooted in the experiences and works of an architecture teacher, disturbed by Escobar’s statement, by the perceptions of a deepening separation between nature and culture within the academic community, by the pursuit of reevaluating the role of architectural design in the construction of worlds and by the positioning of architectural design as a political practice capable of producing profound changes in the ecological entanglements that sustains and foster life. Landscape architecture was used as an analytical tool to understand the implications of architectural design, whose application goes beyond the agency of experts or anthropocentric perspectives. Renouncing the use of visual records in this thesis, I invite the reader to access his memories, his ways of being and being part of the world, and his active imagination, just as when listening to an oral storytelling. How many forms of knowledge have not been transmitted in this way? I broaden the concept of landscape architecture by building bridges to other disciplinary fields, epistemologies and non-modern ontologies. I address stories of the interaction amongst multiple agencies, such as humans, non-humans and “more-than-human”, of which the latter, despite being invisible, has been acting before and continues acting throughout modernity, making worlds and designing landscapes. I present to the reader landscapes of Bahia where the dynamics of natural patterns and processes have established mutual relationships between entities over time and I propose innovative approaches to create environments that critically engage and transcend the binary frameworks of separating nature and culture in landscape architecture and other areas. Applying practices and technologies that activate and animate landscapes, I connect alternative thoughts with actions for an ethical, situated and relational reorientation of landscape, urban and architectural design and literacy. My here expressed thoughts contribute as a theoretical-political praxis, intertwining the multiplicity of landscape designers and their ways of making worlds, to regenerate a wounded land.