Material Sovereignties in the Western Amazon
1.24.25
Maria Paz Gutierrez
Introduction
Like many other new territories in the western Amazonian region in South America, border dwellings are formed by construction inadequacies. Such shortfalls stem from the critical health and environmental implications of materials and technologies applied and from the loss of the deep technology of local material culture sourced from the woven palm. The woven palm served as a medium for controlling heat transfer and light diffusion, as well as a deterrent against insect intrusions. These physical capacities were inherently interdependent on the cosmological dimensions of the woven palm cladding. As such, this article argues that the woven palm cladding implicates questions of deep technology. I argue that deep technology sits at the intersection of technique, material, and space. Within the context of this study, we see weave/assemblage as the technique, the palm as the material, and the roof-wall continuum as the space, the complex dynamics of these components constituting deep technology in the context of the western Amazon. Deep technologies, as posited by Keekok Lee, impact the very nature of things to reconfigure them for human purposes.1 Therefore, “deep” technological innovation fundamentally transforms nature into just another manmade artifact, entailing two potential ontological categories. Does the woven palm and its dimensions, cosmological and physical, imply and implicate deep technology in this sense?
From this premise, the article argues that material sovereignties and the loss of the ontological values of deep technology are the result of converging international and national government agendas to promote the self-aided tropical house in Latin America, of private sector agendas promoting industrialized construction materials, and of architectural modernism, encompassing European and North American ideologies in regard to the “social house of the tropics.” Material sovereignty consequently may be defined as the ideological and socioeconomic agenda underlying materials and technologies, which disrupt the dynamics of their ontological and local environmental value. This article explores how the deliberate eradication and radical loss of the palm material culture of inhabitation became a cohort of industrial material sovereignties and, through the lens of the palm-craft ethos of the western Amazon, addresses the scalability of material technologies as modes of production within a social reality.
Crisnejas (meaning “thatched palm” in the local dialect), the study presented and illustrated here, hypothesizes that the democratization of 3D printing of native palms can originate paths for the reclamation of material culture as alternative sovereignties in the western Amazon. This hypothesis is approached through knowledge coproduction processes, considering complex social dynamics and favoring adaptability, as opposed to autocratic absolute values that have been imposed for the past hundred years. Crisnejas comprises ethnographic and typological research of palm craft and of emerging technologies as originators of the material cultures developed from 2014 to 2017 on Fantasy Island, which is located on the transnational border of the western Amazon. The text explores material sovereignty through the social and physical dimensions of the artifactual in four parts: 1) the agendas behind the self-aided tropical house, promoted from the 1920s to 1960s, and the supplantation of thatched palm; 2) contemporary houses and shifts in flood patterns in the western Amazon; 3) the role and culture of galvanized zinc and fiber cement panels; and 4) Crisnejas—3D printed palm as a medium for future material sovereignties in the western Amazon.
1. The Self-Aided Tropical House in the Western Amazon
Albert Frisch’s albumen silver print from 1867 stages a longhouse, locally termed maloca (Figure 6.8). The print embodies two fundamental traits of the traditional houses of the western Amazon—the thatched palm strip as the building module (positioned at the entrance) and its application, through intricate weaving, to render the wall and roof as one continuous body. This maloca is situated in what is now known as Tabatinga, at the core of the so-called Amazonian Trapezium where Brazil, Peru, and Colombia converge, and just across from Fantasy Island—an island territory resulting from the rapid formation of a branching river. Figure 6.7, right side, developed with data from “Remote Sensing-Based Analysis of the Planform Changes in the Upper Amazon River over the Period 1986–2006,”2 presents the rapid island formations on the riverine floodplains on the transnational border. Like many other territories in the region, Fantasy Island is populated by rural indigenous migrants to the unclaimed lands, devoid of infrastructure.
The northwestern Amazon’s riverine ethos thrived around a material culture of thatched-palm craft. The maloca was the primary cultural artifact created to represent cosmological beliefs. Characterized by a rich breadth of typological diversity in local palm craft, articulated at once within the continuous thatched-palm enclosure, the maloca embodied northwestern Amazonian palm-craft culture.3 Palm weaving systems vary based on the type of leaf, the cutting technique applied, and the geometric progression of the leaves as they form strips, functioning as modules.4 More than fifty species are used for temporary and longer-term housing in northwestern Amazonia.5 Figure 6.9 presents an analytical diagram of ratio and geometries of the palm (Pholidostachys synanthera) used in construction along the transnational border of the western Amazon.
The complex weaving used in the western Amazon supported diverse morphologies in the region. Enclaves demonstrate the slow insertion of other materials as well, including wood planks, wattle, and daub frames that were combined with the thatched palm in the nineteenth century. Figure 6.7, on the left side, presents contemporary housing in Fantasy Island with the characteristic insertion of low-cost industrial materials. The use of the thatched palm was also detected in ethnic groups in the eastern Amazon (e.g., Xingu) during the nineteenth century6 and in other regions of South America, for example in Argentina.7
Toward the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century, the field of tropical medicine made various suggestions as to how buildings and “village” housing could be produced to minimize “public health risks.”8 The new tropical house rose mainly as the product of European and North American values prescribing what was ideal from these perspectives.9 A vast array of implications resulted from these cultural insertions, from which the thatched-palm malocas of the northwestern Amazon were not immune. However, a predisposition supported by local interests in the self-aided house and self-construction was already present in regions such as Brazil.
During the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, views around tropical housing and wall enclosures fluctuated greatly with shifting preoccupations, from how to minimize health risks and idealization of vernacular architecture to the perception that architecture in the tropics was without character and overly instinctive or colonial.10
The most influential conceptual contribution toward the ideal of the self-aided tropical house can be attributed to Jacob Crane’s “Huts and Houses in the Tropics” (1949). Crane’s report on tropical houses and huts aimed to fuel new housing policy for tropical regions.11 The article advocated for the self-aided house and, through it, the combined use of local and industrial materials, objectives that were supported by the Housing and Home Finance Agency in Washington, DC, and promoted throughout the developing world by agencies of the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Nations.12 Crane’s agenda, subsequently modeled in terms of other funding mechanisms, streamlined the progressive adoption of industrial materials in Latin America in the twentieth century. For the northwestern Amazon, this meant the progressive loss of the palm-craft culture and the implications of that loss on typological diversity.
A series of articles was published as early as the mid-twenties, including “Building with Your Own Hands” (“Construir por suas mãos”).13 These bolstered the same agenda with notions of “modern and good materials” and were supported with advertisements in leading journals that were sources for learning industry techniques, including the implementation of such materials (e.g., cement) for the sake of economic advantage14 and even longevity.15 The diffusion of the stipulations by the Pan-American Congress on Popular Houses in 1939 (Congresso Pan-americano de casas populares 1939) and Chapter 5 (“Construction of Inexpensive Houses”) of the Pan-American Congress report of 1939 determined that the appropriate materials to use in inexpensive and self-aided houses were “modernized brick” and cement. Furthermore, for almost two decades, such approaches have remained unchallenged. The question “why are people architects?” put forth by Bo Bardi in the Brazilian art journal Habitat16 challenged not the notion of self-construction but of why and how it mattered. She argues that the dweller requires fulfillment rather than rhetorical ornamentation and that its author understands it as a process of the intimacy of constructing it from day to day. In this role, material productions of the maker are positioned orthogonally to the agendas of the self-aided tropical house through international, industry, and local government agendas in the region.
Rural–urban migration became the right vehicle in the western Amazon to experiment and exercise the concept of the self-aided house by responding to the demands of rapid, low-cost constructions. The local migration processes in the western Amazon during the twentieth century and these past two decades have fomented the cross-pollination of individual communities with hybrid models of traditional typologies in urban spaces. The substantial transformations in construction material technology and typologies of the tropical house in the Amazon since the early twentieth century cannot be understood as a phenomenon isolated from the intertwined global socioeconomic, political, and architectural modernist agendas in the tropics.
To date, limited architectural typological analyses and surveys of the socioeconomic characteristics associated with these regional typologies have been developed. Riaño Umbarila’s study provides an overview of the inadequacy of the industrial materials used in housing enclosures in the past decades.17 The study determined that the predominantly short lifespan of the houses stems from inadequate material technologies to withstand floods and other climatic demands.18 Martin Brañas and Torres produced the only empirical assessment of the thermal implications of replacing thatched-palm enclosures in the northwestern Amazon with industrial panels, supporting Riaño’s argument. The Brañas and Torres study indicated that the house’s internal temperature when covered in galvanized zinc was, on average, 6°C higher than the house covered in the thatched palm.19 These findings coincide with comparative studies on other tropical houses with galvanized steel zinc-coated panels in tropical regions in the Americas, including the Dominican Republic, with temperatures rising up to 15°C higher than with natural materials.20 In the western Amazon, the supplantation of thatched-palm material culture has been intertwined with the disappearance of the doubled height intrinsic to the maloca’s design, further aggravating the increase in indoor temperature and other spatial phenomena related to housing. Evidently, the effects of supplanting the thatched palm extend beyond the enclosure itself and how it embodies space and meaning.
From 2014 to 2017, I developed ethnographic research on Fantasy Island in the Amazonian Trapezium. The survey was developed based on interviews on cladding, space perceptions, and meaning in Fantasy Island indigenous urban communities. The research involved an in-depth analysis of the multidimensional layers of the palm cladding typologies21 and flood resilience.22 Combined with the ethnographic research, I developed an onsite typological analysis associated with construction flooding variables. The typological analysis was guided by a framework that I developed, which comprised sixty-four variables (quantitative and qualitative) of flood actions on walls. The complex interdependency between the physical and typological conditions of flood dimensions is identified in Figure 6.10.
Based on the identified flood dimensions and the scant literature available for review, I developed typological metrics and interviews for assessing housing and cladding. Metrics on the cladding dimensions and locations of materials and construction systems for the typological analysis enabled the diagramming of the correlation between elevations and slopes and the construction systems and materials of envelopes in Fantasy Island. The techniques applied assessed features of interactions with the community recorded manually in drawings, terms, and gestures. Subsequently, the collected information was processed for pattern analysis of proclivities and differences in value perspectives on industrial cladding materials and technologies and their inadequacies according to the inhabitants.
The primary transformation identified was the loss of the roof-wall continuum. This phenomenon pertains to the nexus of material-form-symbol. The maloca’s material culture loss impinges on the signifier and signified space. Figure 6.11, left side, synthesizes the analysis of sixteen surveyed houses in Fantasy Island. Subtle and drastic differences in morphology, dimensions, foundation, and assemblages are expressed in relation to the way that seasonal and extreme flooding for varying slopes impacts structures. The variation of the ground section is a notation of the assigned relevance to the inadequacy of the current house by the occupiers, based on interviews. Figure 6.11, right side, also synthesizes the study of adjacencies of material expressions in the facades associated with the roof-wall continuum. The typological and cladding adjacency analysis of current urban indigenous houses in Fantasy Island demonstrated that the plurality of form, space, and craft of traditional malocas had been lost, and ultimately lost was the maloca’s role as a spatial signifier, communicating a sense of belonging and identity within local communities. Thus, the material loss of the thatched palm and roof-wall continuum is an interdependent cultural, health, and environmental dimension.
The breadth of geometric variations of the plan (elliptical, octagonal, hexagonal, circular, square) and volume, including the gables and the scale of the roof walls, is synthesized in Figure 6.12 (traditional–left column; contemporary–right column). Current structures are primarily the result of functional needs and the economic capacity to have a larger space as a mere extension of a rectangle on pilotis (Figure 6.12, right). The insertion of these industrial materials and spatial characteristics has produced units undifferentiated from other informal tropical riverine settlements in South America and globally that use similar construction materials and technologies.
The walls of contemporary houses in Fantasy Island, depicted in Figure 6.12, are interdependently affected by the loss of the thatched palm. Enclosures currently are divided into: a) galvanized zinc panels positioned for a vertical corrugation; b) cardboard; c) vertical wood planks; d) plastic sheathing; e) combinations of all these enclosures, all attached to wood frames of low structural integrity. Figure 6.12, right, compares the survey with traditional maloca morphologies and construction systems in the Trapezium before incorporating industrial panels.
Column 1 (left): Axonometric diagrams of housing geometries and dimensions varying from 80 m2 to 800 m2 in floor plan.
Column 2 (left-center): Enclosure technology of thatched palm with wattle and daub system (top); wood frame and thatched palm (top-center); and wood planks and wood frame (bottom-center) and wood planks thatched palm (bottom).
Column 3 (right-center): Axonometric diagrams of housing geometries and enclosure materials for contemporary housing.
Column 4 (right): Enclosure technology of contemporary housing with inadequate industrial materials: galvanized zinc plates (top); wood frames and cardboard (top-center); untreated wood frames and planks (bottom-center); plastic sheathing and frames (bottom).
A granular discussion of the survey results spans beyond the scope of this article. However, it is relevant to denote that those communities in Fantasy Island had converging views on the importance of continuing to use the palm as well as a shared sense that repeated traditional weaving craft is unrealistic for today’s demands and realities. While the alternative panelling materials Calamina and Telhas Eternit are not deemed ideal, their rise recognizes the advantages of rapid implementation and low cost. The qualitative typological analysis consistently confirmed the inadequacy of current industrial enclosure materials from the identified interdependent cultural, health, and environmental dimension with which the palm craft cannot compete.
The extensive impact of galvanized zinc sheets in western Amazon explicitly promoted by government-supported projects, international agencies, and architectural modernism, in combination with a decrease in cost, led to its predominance in local housing enclosures up to today. These assertions of typological meaning do not require a nostalgic return to traditional houses. Such a position would signify falling in line with biased assumptions about the current and future material cultures of indigenous groups in and beyond the Amazon. Material productions and cultures are the results of ongoing dynamic processes. Hence, current urban indigenous groups in Fantasy Island are keenly interested in new technologies. Such interests are combined with shared values across the multiple Amerindian communities that inhabit Fantasy Island, including the Tikuna, Makuna, Bora, Murui, and Muiname. These rural-urban communities also seek to preserve individual material cultural values that are understood as continuous, and the palm expressions are one of these that is repeatedly conveyed in the surveys and dialogues. Nevertheless, how can such opportunities be shaped in the future, and what role do fundamental shifts in the physical environment, chiefly inundation patterns, bear on future architecture? The next section addresses this interrogation of the role of flooding on contextual material production of the thatched palm.
2. Flooding Vicissitudes
The western Amazon is the most biologically rich part of the Amazon basin. This region includes parts of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and western Brazil, comprising one of the planet’s most biodiverse areas for many taxa, including plants, insects, amphibians, birds, and mammals.23 It also embodies ample diversity of indigenous ethnic groups, including some of the world’s last uncontacted peoples. Unlike the eastern Amazon, the western Amazon remains comparatively less altered. However, underlying this landscape are significant reserves of oil and gas, many yet untapped, creating significant interest from government and industry. The growing global demands in this century are leading to unprecedented exploration and development in this region, inordinately impacting the resources, including soil and water, and peoples in the western Amazon. Without improved policies, the increasing scope and magnitude of planned extraction mean that environmental and social impacts in the region are likely to intensify.24 Comparatively less discussed challenges pertain to the rapidly growing unmanaged urbanization and the impacts that the complex resource extraction processes, migration, and changing climate patterns are producing.25 Rural, rural-urban, and isolated communities are heavily impacted by climate change in myriad ways.
The Amazon River runs more than 6,000 km from the Andean region in Peru to the Atlantic Ocean in Brazil. The Solimões River—a local name—and its tributaries make up the Upper Amazon. The Solimões has a very dynamic morphology with the highest rates of sediment migration in the entire Amazon River.26 Inundation patterns of the Amazon riverbanks have drastically changed in the last decade.
The upper western Amazon has an anabranching channel pattern that comprises numerous channels characterized by vegetated and alluvial islands, which divide flows at discharges up to bank-full.27 Fantasy Island, the case study context for this investigation, is a direct product of an anabranching river that was rapidly formed. Formed thirty years ago, the territory of Fantasy Island was so named by locals because it disappears underwater during the wet season.
The Solimões region in the northwest has experienced increasingly higher temperatures and more frequent floods and droughts over the past two decades.28 Climate change also has a direct hydrological impact on the region.29 The intensification of the hydrological cycle is concentrated in the wet season, driving higher differences between the Amazon’s peaks and minimum flows.30 The increase in peaks and variations between extremes is also exacerbated by the growing shifts in seasonal patterns.31 Over the past decade, intense climate-hydrological extremes have been recorded as large-scale droughts and floods.32 Some of these events, such as the extreme flood of 2012, have been termed “once-in-a-century” inundations resulting in continuously increasing severity of the wet season flood pulse in the western Amazon.33
Flooding dynamics along the Amazon/Solimoes River were analyzed over nine years (2006–2015), presenting strong heterogeneities in water velocity magnitude and anomalies in inundation duration.34 A strengthening in the Walker circulation,35 resulting from strong tropical Atlantic warming and tropical Pacific cooling, is understood as the primary reason for this climate change impact.36
Model projections suggest that flood extremes in the western Amazon will likely be more frequent and intense in the future.37 In the transnational border of Leticia/Tabatinga/Santa Rosa in the western Amazon, significant alterations in peaks and timing of the wet-dry seasons have been recorded following the extreme flood event in 2012.38 Traditionally, the wet (or flooded) season in the Amazon has been from December to April, and the dry season has been from June to December. However, these conditions and other recent changes in observational data39 enhance the likelihood of the rainy season being an internal control mechanism of the rainforest.
The qualitative typological evaluation of enclosure systems in current urban-house models in Fantasy Island was intersected with flooding data. The conceptual diagram (Figure 6.13, left) indexes the inverse ratio of income and flood impact, with the highest flood impacts concentrated up to 56 percent among the lowest incomes and 41 percent in the low-middle incomes.40 Figure 6.13, right, also shows the flood patterns and peaks, incorporating data from the article “Extreme Seasonal Climate Variations in the Amazon Basin: Droughts and Floods.”41 The housing models depicted are based on the surveyed homes of the typological analysis. The water levels show peaks that are 33 percent higher than a mere ten years ago, shifting from an 8 m average maximum to 12 m. One of the direct implications is that current pilotis heights are insufficient for structural and decay resistance, which is exacerbated by low-quality industrial products. These, in turn, release toxins back into the river, creating a loop of health and environmental problems.
Arguably, in a culture that developed around seasonal flooding, the impacts of flooding extremes should, in principle, be lower. However, evidence suggests that the vicissitudes and severity of western Amazonian flooding in the last decade have exacerbated their disruptiveness. The precarious construction systems, particularly of inadequate industrial building enclosures in informal settings, have become increasingly disrupted. Entrapped heat, toxicity, and vulnerability are some of the multiple physical implications of losing the thatched palm as a primary construction system in the region. The dry-wet season shifts caused by climate change impacts are generating further climate-related challenges with comfort and culture, including complications to seasonal migrations that were intrinsic to urban settlements in enclaves such as Fantasy Island. Such cultural and spatial consequences are dimensions of the loss of the thatched palm that, while more challenging to quantify, bear profound social implications.
3. Calamina and Eternit Sovereignty in the Western Amazon
The insertion of metal and fiber cement panels into the region and the value they subsequently assumed are deeply rooted in international agendas promoting the tropical house and its purportedly superior technologies, which were supported by discussions on the power of industrialized panels, as the means of rapid production and low cost continued to be challenged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In an interview with Tomás Maldonado on the “Future of the Modern Project,” the regionally renowned Argentinian architect and theoretician articulated his position on construction pessimism.42 Maldonado had previously addressed, through the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), World Bank Group in Mexico City in 1980, the paternalism of “poor technology” and its inherent romanticization of the user as a driver of isolationism. He argued that third world contexts require differentiated, pluralist, mixed strategies for true technological innovation. Maldonado states, “While the design is entirely connected to material cultural production, it must dwell within the contradictions of the industrial era. At present, it lacks maturity and requires a redefinition.”43
Ironically, the issue of the journal in which Maldonado’s article was published, Módulo (founded by Oscar Niemeyer and in print from 1955 to 1986) had, on its back cover, an advertisement for fiber cement panels. These panels, locally known as Telhas Eternit, were marketed with the promise of “more roofing with fewer tiles” (Figure 6.14). More than a mere material replacement, the ad sells the idea of reducing roofing production needs. This is quintessentially antithetical to palm cladding culture, where the roof and wall are thatched through highly complex geometries and operate as spatial signifiers. In Peru and Colombia, the predominant cladding panels are the corrugated galvanized zinc known as Calamina. Together, the Telhas Eternit and Calamina became the media that would, to varying degrees, eradicate the palm ethos in the western Amazon.
The inadequacy of zinc panels for wet tropical environments in the Amazon has also been discussed in regard to corrosion44 and insect penetration. Increasing indoor temperature, with the humidity in the region, significantly decreases climate comfort. It also foments the growth of indoor pathogens that thrive in higher temperatures, including some species of fungi.45 Additionally, while industrial materials, in principle, are more resistant to insect penetration, the corrosion caused by flooding cycles annuls this claim.46 Hence, material porosity and cladding permeability must be tackled associatively. The physical inadequacy of the material and technology, meanwhile, cannot distract from the profound cultural implications, triggered by the loss of design agency in the thatched palm, upon an ethos where material expression of the world is rooted in community-based craft.
Beyond a mere substitution of products, this loss of material culture is as multifaceted as it is multidimensional. The Telhas Eternit and the Calamina panels embodied material sovereignty sourced from eradication protocols in the western Amazon. The extensive and recalcitrant agenda of the self-aided house of the tropics, coupled with the metal and fiber cement industrial panels, persisted through the twentieth century. Eventually, they became emblematic in the western Amazon of the modern. Material processes in the western Amazon are continuously undergoing substantial physical and socioeconomic alterations, further transforming material cultures in the last decade. It cannot be overlooked that the Calamina and the Telhas Eternit constitute current material productions and, to some extent, material cultures. Comparative discussions on the role of the same galvanized zinc panels in other developing regions are being assessed. Presumably, due to their climate comfort, environmental problems, and role in native plant material supplantation, such panels should be replaced and such homes rebuilt and forgotten. Nevertheless, material sovereignty, operating on the imposed eradication of precedents, even when set in motion with the best intentions is potentially disruptive. For example, Honwana has eloquently argued that for the Mafalala residents, a house made of wood planks and galvanized zinc panels—the same Calamina—is a cultural patrimony in Maputo, Mocambique.47 For decades, these units in Kam’phumo’s periphery were indicators of social suitability and respectability. Thus, design necessitates interrogations beyond external assumptions of functionality and value to address material productions and uses within their local material culture.
4. Crisnejas—Future Material Sovereignties in the Western Amazon
Construction materials account for almost half the yearly solid waste generated worldwide.48 By 2025, building material waste is expected to increase to 2.2 billion tons annually.49 The staggering volume of construction material waste demands investment in transformative technologies sourced from biological materials. The growing interest in replacing conventional oil-based building materials with natural waste, in the form of bioplastics, compounds, and biocomposites, including plant residues, has been extensively reviewed50 with advancements made in the role of materials computation and artificial intelligence for biomass innovation in construction.51 Bioplastics are biodegradable at the end of their operational life after the removal of any additives not based on natural raw materials. The capacity to resource native plant residues (i.e., biomass) is also potentially advantageous for community growth, particularly in informal economies.
In recent years, a growing interest in biomass use through emerging technologies has spanned from developing insulation panels and building modules to designing structural systems using robotics combined with digital fabrication, including Computer Numerical Control (CNC) milling and 3D printing.52 Ongoing research focuses on the structural and insulation innovation of biomass.53 As beneficial as many of these investigations are from the perspective of material properties and fabrication technologies, such research is typically carried out separate from the contexts where these technologies are expected to be implemented and scalable. In the context of design experimentations in architecture, the focus also encompasses aesthetic and formal variables. However, scalability is still fundamentally assumed to be dimensional. While scalability is highly relevant, the design, intended for implementation in sites with inherited biomass practices, impinges on material culture. Therefore, scalability, beyond dimensional implications, affects the social reality of peoples, craft, and artifact as constituents of space. Interrogations of the dimensional and production-related implications of emerging technologies in the western Amazon are here presented through the lens of Crisnejas.
The mechanical and physical properties of biomass produced through advanced manufacturing (AM) for construction applications are minimal.54 The bulk of this research has been around the evaluation and review of (i) microscale mechanics of biomass composites characterization,55 (ii) numerical models of particle distribution and cross laminate in AM,56 (iii) and scalability of 3D printing in general as an economic model.57
Crisnejas was birthed as media to evaluate the material culture implications of developing 3D-printed palm cladding in Fantasy Island. This investigation was developed through a multidimensional approach encompassing the material-technology-context nexus. The nexus implicates multiple physical and social dynamics, illustrated in the documentation in Figure 6.15. This investigation was paralleled by an extensive assessment of the mechanical, hygrothermal, and water resistant properties of 3D printed palm panels vis-à-vis two other biomass (cork and bamboo) from the nano-micron to the architectural scale.58 Palms have the broadest range of mechanical strength/stiffness with a 100 order of magnitude.59 A significant degree of variability in viscosity, based on temperature and extrusion processes, including melting, has been studied in terms of synthetic polyethylene60 and purely biodegradable composites, but not in terms of potential use as 3D printing filler. In addition to its cultural value and distinctive mechanical properties, the palm carries complex economic and environmental implications on the region and across the globe.
Palms produce the highest biomass volume worldwide, accruing ninety million tons of waste per year.61 Their extraction, chiefly for palm oil, is also heavily implicated in environmental problems, including to the Amazon.62 Tropical peatlands in the western Amazon, of the keystone palm Mauritia flexuosa, store approximately 104 billion tonnes of carbon1 (PgC) and embody unique combinations of flora and fauna that provide a wide range of resources for indigenous and local communities,63 requiring the reassessment of sustainable farming’s role from more comprehensive frameworks.64 Accordingly, the development of new material technologies sourced from palm biomass in the western Amazon requires a comprehensive, multidimensional approach that explores the interdependencies of cultural, economic, and environmental implications of new material productions. A crucial part of this analysis requires working with local communities to understand specific onsite production and delivery processes supported by material properties (mechanics and durability) research. In Crisnejas, this was carried out through ethnographic research on the role of the impermeable panel versus the screen, with community participation.
Indigenous communities are increasingly recognized for contributing uniquely to disaster risk management.65 While their enclaves are often highly vulnerable, they also hold traditional knowledge that enables greater understanding of hazards and disasters. Recent reports point toward the need for local communities to work alongside technical experts in the design of flood risk alleviation schemes for outputs that are both more socially acceptable and technically successful.66 In the context of building technology, the concept of coproduction for flood risk resilience elicits various interpretations. Opportunities for local community interaction range from direct involvement in the production of construction systems to design input providing their value perspectives on technologies. Building enclosures influence and are influenced by the conceptualization of form, space, and matter as cultural manifestations. From this premise, the research for Crisnejas recognizes that cultural and aesthetic parameters play a significant role in emerging technologies. The emerging technology, in this case, is the 3D printed palm panel screen with flood resilience capacities.
The analysis of current enclosures and community surveys of value perspectives in Fantasy Island indicated a need for flood-resilient cladding to support decay prevention and thermal efficiency. Community participants also indicated the need for enclosures with permeability, for natural ventilation, but also with light control and the capacity to prevent insects’ entry. The design and manufacturing investigation developed in Crisnejas explored alternative models for i) functional gradience of biomass for structural screens and ii) surface properties of anti-adherence and repellence.
Nanoscale corrugation’s surface properties support insect-harboring prevention while improving water repellence. At the same time, the transition from panels to screens, through control of morphology and permeability, supports the climate control interests manifested by the community. Optimizing control parameters and mixtures of the palm biomass allows us to design surface roughness, porosity, particle, and fiber distribution functionalities. Such strategies can make biomass productions and products resilient to flooding and potentially economically advantageous. The method deployed for the functional gradience of the panel screens worked as a translational palm weaving through the extrusion process. This method controlled the densities of the biomass particles, the surface roughness, and the binding of the layer-to-layer interface. Figure 6.16 diagrams the primary functionalities determined critical to control for plant waste compounds’ scalability in fused deposition modeling (FDM). In the left-most column, we can observe the theoretical (material) implications of particle dispersion, surface roughness, interface conditions, and microstructure (lattice). The left-center column shows the numerical simulation for panels made of palm waste and biodegradable polymers (PLA-PHA).67 To the right of the left-center simulations, we can observe the resulting experimental findings of the composites. On the right side of Figure 6.16, we can observe how the conceptual, simulated, and experimental findings are integrated into controlling multiple material parameters of bamboo-PLA-PHA composite, in terms of particle-binder ratios, porosity, surface roughness, and toolpath, to create the lattice with optimized raster angle to simulate structural performance and panel production.
The final screens were designed with the communities, exploring patterns with cultural significance through the geometric progressions of varying densities. Crisnejas aimed to establish new dialogues regarding paths for 3D printing scalability. This design process was framed as imperative not in purely dimensional terms but as participatory material production, which can contribute to forging new material cultures sourced from palm residues. The course of actions that emerges in response to these technical inquiries of materials provides pathways with consideration for implications beyond a techno-centered approach and toward a critical production of matter.
Left: Diagram presenting the primary functionalities determined critical to control for plant waste compounds scalability in FDM. Column 1 (far left): Conceptual, theoretical areas. Column 2 (center): Simulation for panels made of palm waste-PLA-PHA. Column 3 (right): Experimental findings of palm residues-PLA-PHA data.
Right: Example of the application of the multiscale model to control multiple material parameters of bamboo-PLA-PHA composite, in regard to particle-binder ratios, porosity, surface roughness, and the toolpath, to create the lattice with optimized raster angle and panel production.68
Acknowledgments
Through the lens of the palm-craft ethos of the western Amazon, this essay has addressed potential transformative linkages between material culture, an indigenous ethos of making, and new technologies to contemporize this ethos into a vibrant new form of architectural production.
I am grateful to members of the Urban Indigenous Community of Fantasy Island, Leticia, Colombia for their support in this paper’s ethnographic and typological investigation. I am grateful for the financial support provided by the Cambridge International Trust for this research and its recognition by the 2020 RIBA Research Medal Award (shortlisted) and the 2021 FemtoArt and Yolo Arts exhibit.
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