Floresta Cidade is also active in teaching at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Through the elective and optional disciplines available in the Department of Architectural Project and also acting in part in Architectural Project I. The proposal is to establish a project studio based on experimentation and debate around the impasses and potentialities of the Anthropocene. Some of our challenges are to think of participatory and sensitive methods, to understand construction matter as cyclical and alive or as Earth and to touch on spiritual issues without this appearing to be something negative or delusional. 

 

The emphasis here is on both the debate and project methodology. Through collective readings and lectures, the methodology linked to the debate seeks to develop listening to sensibilities that rarely enter universities, such as Amerindian, Afro-diasporic, feminist, activist or even minor science and art. The participatory and affective methodology of the project is corporal, the result of more than 15 years of research by professor Iazana Guizzo, who is also the coordinator of Floresta Cidade. The Terceira Margem project method invites students to participate in sensory experiences that recover memories, activate desires and promote sensations so that with them a belonging to their own body and the body of the Earth can be experienced in a unique way._cc781905-5cde-3194- bb3b-136bad5cf58d_

 

It is this belonging that makes the design exercise change from its meaning to its materiality. Projects that understand the earth as alive, that propose trees as protagonists, that break the ground to recover connections, that make the roof an opening to the cosmos, among many other examples, set the tone of a studio that seeks to think about the making of architecture, urbanism and landscaping from the sensations experienced in their own bodies and the problems discussed collectively in class. Thus, the exercise of (de)building our cities is nothing more than a means to achieve certain collective results, as Lina Bo Bardi said. It is architecture and urbanism at the service of the regeneration or reactivation of territories. That is, contrary to composing a chain of successive ways of dying linked to extraction, waste and the absence of belonging to the territories, the proposal falls back on researching the craft of the architect/urbanist/landscaper as a means of inciting life cycles.