What Does It Mean to Learn From Brazil? Gabriela de Matos on what two architectural histories, one dominant and one overlooked, can teach about building differently.

What does it mean to learn from Brazil?

Brazil is a country full of polarities, of contradictions. But its diverse cultural and ancestral knowledges can teach us about collective resilience and impart transformative lessons on architectural thinking and practice, should we be open to them.

My notion of what architecture could be expanded when Gilberto Gil, the Brazilian singer and intellectual, compared Oscar Niemeyer’s buildings in Brasília to a piece of music. Bringing architecture into conversation with an art form that can be felt, embodied, and performed. Since then, my practice has sought to rethink how race, gender, ancestral knowledge and ecology can impact how we build spaces and experience architecture.

In Brazil, while 56% of the population self-identifies as Black, there is a critical lack of Afro-Brazilian representation in the field of architecture. Across my architectural, curatorial, research and pedagogical practice, I craft conditions that champion Afro-Brazilian spatial practice to create new modes of collective making. In 2018 I founded Black Female Architects, a project that maps the work of Brazilian Black women in architecture today, highlighting more than 800 professionals across the 26 Brazilian states. Building on that work, I founded Cambará Instituto, a platform that promotes the theoretical, critical and practical production of Afro-Brazilians. Through Cambará, theory becomes matter: a structure, a performance, a dialogue. The projects we develop test how architecture can become a medium for repair, for listening, and for encounter. In that sense, Cambará is not only an institution but an attitude, a curatorial gesture that insists on collective ownership and situated knowledge.

OCO, one of Cambará’s current initiatives, is a residency as well as a bamboo structure that was designed collectively with local artisans and architects. The structure is both a shelter and a place for exchange, gathering people in a practice of repair. It stands as a breathing architecture that transforms as people inhabit it. OCO embodies the very questions that animate my research: How can we build from the exchange of knowledge between Black women? How can the production of space be a form of learning-by-giving-life to anti-colonial projects? Through OCO, the ideas of the Terreiro*—the first expression of Afro-Brazilian architecture—connect collective care and ancestry together through a critical discourse on curating and architectural experimentation. It is where theory, practice, and criticism merge, forming a part of the continuous motion of thinking through making.

My doctoral work with the Curatorial Research Collective examines the relationships between two key sites in Brazil’s architectural heritage: the Ladeira da Misericórdia project by the Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi in Salvador, and the Terreiro Casa Branca do Engenho Velho, a project shaped collectively by the Orixá* and the Quilombola communities.* In between the Terreiro and modernism, I investigate how architectural knowledge can be reimagined when we bring together these two radically different sides of Brazil’s architectural expression.

Though these spaces emerge from different cosmologies,* they both consider architecture as a relational field, grounded in the encounter between body, land and community. Creating this dialogue between the Terreiro and modernism does not intend to create contrast or polarity. Instead, it seeks to learn from coexistence and the different ways these spaces hold time and memory and encourage collective making. By recentering Afro-Brazilian architectures within the history, discourse and knowledge of Brazilian architecture, the project seeks to reveal the diversity of our spatial expression. It challenges the assumption that concrete is a natural, apolitical and universal material capable of solving all architectural problems, and crushes the notion that Brazilian modernism is the unique or definitive representation of our architectural identity.

To learn from Brazil is to recognize that architecture is not merely a discipline of designing buildings, but a process of existence and a practice that can reconnect us to territorial knowledge. Architecture is about how we build after devastation, how memory is embedded in space, and how we imagine other ways of making. In my work, I try to hold these gestures together to make visible that which has been historically silenced and create the conditions for new forms of dialogue to emerge.

That, I believe, is the task of architecture today: to create spaces that not only design the road, but also experiment with ways of inhabiting it.