Established in 2009, the postgraduate program at Escola da Cidade offers lato sensu courses organized around the broad, overarching theme: “Civilization America: A Perspective Through Architecture.”
“America is a continental mass formed by three tectonic plates that define its northern, central, and southern portions. It became a natural territorial unit only 1.5 million years ago, when the small Central American plate rose, joining the two ancient fragments. However, it was only recognized as such in the 16th century, becoming a historical fact. Its discovery inexorably transformed the world. While this unity was being inaugurated in the realm of knowledge, the colonization of these lands imposed a geopolitical dismemberment of the territory and its occupation. Through predation, it decimated a local population of 80 million people in less than a century through war and disease—the greatest massacre in human history. Consequently, it left behind slavery and a fractured territory. On the other hand, it links our entire post-Columbian history to Africa. Critically confronting this fragmentation—as evident in the vertical line of the Treaty of Tordesillas as in the horizontal one that currently divides Latin America from Anglo-Saxon America—reveals itself as the fulcrum of contemporary design reasoning, with an eye toward a more hopeful future for relations between the nations of the Americas and the transformation of nature.
