Five carefully chosen pieces that explore how architecture, ecology and Indigenous knowledge converge across Amazonia, free for registered users
As COP30 unfolds in Belém, global attention is once again drawn to the Amazon and its forest – not only as a site of ecological urgency, but as a living, contested world shaped by infrastructures, Indigenous sovereignties, extractive histories and profound environmental knowledge.
In this month’s reading list, the AR explores Amazonia in all its complexities: it is a region where global climate diplomacy confronts longstanding patterns of infrastructure expansion, as revealed in Martha Dillon’s Outrage; where ancestral practices entwine with contemporary architecture, explored in Guilherme Wisnik’s ‘Pillars of survival’; and where the forest is threatened, defended and continually reimagined, a tension traced by Fiona Watson, Ana María Durán Calisto, and the AR Ecologies podcast with Sebastião Salgado.
Curated from the AR archive, these five free-to-read stories explore how architecture, ecology and Indigenous knowledge converge across Amazonia to illuminate what is at stake and what futures remain possible.
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Outrage: the Amazonian road to COP30, AR June 2025, Martha Dillon
‘COP exacerbates practices of ecological destruction in its host city, but its failings reach much wider’
Pillars of survival: University of Ancestral Knowledge, ceremonial centre and housing prototype in Acre, Brazil, by Rosenbaum, AR September 2025, Guilherme Wisnik
‘The fruitful interaction between Marcelo Rosenbaum and the chief Nixiwaka represents a dialogue between western science and Indigenous ancestral intelligence’
Outrage: the Amazon rainforest under threat, AR October 2019, Fiona Watson
‘In an increasingly homogenised world, the incredible diversity of indigenous peoples is vital’
Indigenous tree knowledges in Amazonia, AR October 2021, Ana María Durán Calisto
‘When did the tree become mere resource? Disenchanted raw material? Monoculture to be exploited and possessed?’
AR Podcast. AR Ecologies: planting trees, October 2021, Sebastião Salgado, Maria Smith and more
‘Trees aren’t a simple solution to the problems that humans have made’
