Anyone expecting the following words to discuss materiality, sustainable construction techniques, woodworking methods, or ways of weaving thatch will be mistaken. This article seeks precisely to shift the focus beyond the aspects that so often define discussions about Indigenous cultures when the subject is “architecture.”
In a universe where the very term “architecture” is foreign, approaching Indigenous constructions—or whatever word might best describe them—through an exclusively material or technological lens is itself an attempt to fit their ways of producing space into Western categories. In doing so, a complex cosmology is reduced to a set of measurable attributes, as if it could be transformed into a checklist applicable to any form of architecture, erasing precisely what makes it distinct: the relationships between territory, body, and memory.
The central premise of this article, therefore, is that among many Indigenous peoples, built space emerges first and foremost from a cosmological dimension. Materiality is not its organizing principle but rather the expression of a way of inhabiting the universe in which space is inseparable from the relationships that give it meaning.
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According to Davi Kopenawa, this cosmology is grounded in a network of reciprocity among humans, animals, plants, rivers, mountains, and spirits, in which all possess agency and belong to the same fabric of existence. By contrast, Western traditions tend to separate humanity from nature, reducing the latter to a resource available for exploitation. It is precisely from this difference that distinct ways of inhabiting and assigning meaning to space emerge.
“Architecture” in Indigenous Worldviews
Thinking about Indigenous dwellings through the conventional lens of architecture means confronting both a semantic and an ontological barrier. In the Western tradition, architecture presupposes a separation between subject and object, culture and nature, as well as the figure of an architect-author who designs for a utilitarian purpose. For many Indigenous peoples, built space escapes this division. In several Indigenous languages, the Western notion of a “house” or “building” does not exist in the same way. What exists instead is an extension of social organization, the forest, and kinship relations.
The Yanomami perspective offers an important example. As one of the largest relatively isolated Indigenous peoples in South America, the Yanomami understand architecture as something that cannot be reduced to a fixed structure or simple shelter. Thiago Benucci defines it as “the place where hammocks are hung”—a space situated in time and territory, relational in nature, continuously ephemeral and mutable, and guided by a logic of minimal environmental impact.
As Benucci argues, to inhabit means to be part of the urihi, the forest-land, understood not merely as a physical environment but as a web of paths, memories, and relationships built over generations. The inhabited place corresponds to the point where a hammock is temporarily hung, connecting the present to the journeys of ancestors. Yanomami architecture should therefore be understood less as the construction of permanent objects and more as the temporary materialization of relationships between people and territory. A similar argument was advanced by Carsten and Hugh-Jones in their studies of the peoples of the Guianas:
There are no inherited ancestral estates and no enduring social units that survive beyond the lives of the leaders who build the houses with which communities identify themselves. The only permanent houses are the mountains, the dwellings of invisible spirits; human settlements are merely transient evidence of these enduring homes. — Carsten and Hugh-Jones
The Same Earth That Heals, Builds
Within this materialization—even when temporary—it is possible to perceive a complex network of relationships with materials and techniques that extends far beyond their “architectural” characteristics. At the beginning of her article Building Another Village, Daniela Alarcon recounts hearing from a Tupinambá Indigenous woman that the only chance of survival after being bitten by a vine snake is to run to an anthill and eat three clumps of earth. This Tupinambá remedy forms part of a broader set of healing practices based on earth, combined with other ingredients. “The soil that the ants bring to the surface is the medicine; they do not move the earth for no reason.”
The earth, therefore, exceeds its condition as mere matter or resource. Present in medicinal knowledge, it reappears in floors and walls, making it impossible to regard it simply as a raw material. What modern perspectives often separate into categories such as materiality, culture, and belief appears here as inseparable dimensions of the same existence. Building and healing are not distinct practices but different ways of relating to the earth and recognizing it as a presence that sustains everyday life across multiple spheres.
Territory as Archive
At another scale, this integration of territory, memory, and ways of inhabiting also emerges in recent discoveries in the Amazon. In March 2025, the fall of a centuries-old tree in Fonte Boa, Amazonas, revealed funerary urns buried beneath the floodplain soil. From these findings, researchers identified traces of an ancient artificial island raised with earth, ceramic fragments, and plant fibers to adapt to the seasonal flooding cycles of Lake Cochila. The structure reveals not only a sophisticated strategy for living with the forest but also a place where memory, ancestry, and habitation intertwine. The urns, containing human remains alongside fish and turtles, point to a cosmology in which food, territory, and funerary rituals are not separate domains but expressions of the same way of being in the world.
The discovery reinforces the idea that Indigenous building practices have always been linked to complex forms of coexistence with the environment, whether through ephemeral structures such as hammocks or more permanent constructions. In both cases, these ways of inhabiting stand in contrast to contemporary models of sustainability, which are often based on extractive logics and decontextualized solutions.
This critique guides the work of the Organizmo Foundation, created by Colombian architect Ana María Gutiérrez. After returning to Colombia in 2008, she established a center dedicated to ecological construction and the preservation of ancestral knowledge from traditional communities. For Gutiérrez, the challenge is not to recover an idealized past but to recognize ancestral knowledge as a living form of knowledge. “As architects, we need to unlearn everything we have been taught,” she stated in an interview with The Guardian. “Our idea of progress is completely based on colonial and extractive practices. People talk about sustainability, but what exactly are we sustaining?”
Inhabiting the Permanence of Relationships
In recent years, it has become possible to observe an effort—whether genuine or not—to expand the boundaries of architecture, pushing against its limits and bringing it closer to other dimensions of life. Perhaps driven by anxiety over planetary transformations and the survival of our own species, there is a growing recognition that modern paradigms no longer provide sufficient answers. Yet moving architecture away from this position is not a simple task. It requires letting go of labels, categories, and catalogs. It requires daring not only in techniques and materials but, above all, in the way we understand the meaning of building—not as the production of an object detached from the world, but as part of and a consequence of the relationships that constitute it.
In this movement, looking at Indigenous conceptions of “architecture” means understanding a profound respect for the ground beneath our feet, a desire for symbiosis rather than control over territory. As Ailton Krenak suggests, “instead of operating in the landscape, we should blend in with it.” It is an architecture that, in Benucci’s words, treads lightly on the earth and leaves the smallest possible trace. A lightness that should not be mistaken for technical precariousness, but understood according to its own values and worldviews.
From this perspective, architecture ceases to be a practice oriented toward the accumulation of matter and the imposition of lasting forms upon the landscape. To inhabit is, instead, to participate in the cycles of life, continuously renewing the bonds between people, territory, and community. Against the logic of excess and possession, the “way of hanging hammocks” described by Benucci points toward another notion of permanence—not the permanence of things, but of relationships. Perhaps this is one of the greatest contributions Indigenous worldviews can offer contemporary architecture: a reminder that building is not about occupying the Earth, but about learning how to live with it.
This article is part of the ArchDaily Topic: Transspecies Architecture. Every month we explore a topic in-depth through articles, interviews, news, and architecture projects. We invite you to learn more about our ArchDaily Topics. And, as always, at ArchDaily we welcome the contributions of our readers; if you want to submit an article or project, contact us.
