Key details
Date
- 16 September 2020
Author
- RCA
Read time
- 1 minute
Architect and researcher Dr Godofredo Pereira leads the MA Environmental Architecture and MA City Design programmes at the RCA. Through both his academic and non academic work, he seeks to understand the contribution and potential impact that architecture can make towards addressing climate change, environmental change and their ramifications on the way people live around the world. ‘Western forms of urbanisation have failed us’ he states ‘particularly in what relates to the environment and to climate.’
Godofredo studied at the School of Architecture, University of Porto, and The Bartlett School of Architecture, London, where he also taught before joining the RCA. His doctoral research titled ‘The Underground Frontier: Technoscience and Collective Politics’ investigated political and territorial conflicts within the planetary race for underground resources, focusing on Venezuelan petropolitics and environmental conflicts in the Atacama Desert in Chile.
He is a research member of Forensic Architecture, where he leads the Atacama Desert project, a geo-forensic investigation of environmental and territorial transformations in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Working together with local lawyers and activists he has produced films and cartographies, as well as technical and theoretical research in support of local indigenous communities. This work has been exhibited at the Berardo Collection Museum, Lisbon (2013); in Dhaka at the Goethe Institute (2013); and in the HKW in Berlin, as part of the Forensics exhibition (2014).
Deforestation in Santa Cruz, Bolivia , Godofredo Pereira 2016 USGS, Landsat 8
Militancy, which he defines as ‘a constant commitment for pursuing a line of questioning around architecture in environmental disputes and environmental change’, is very important to Godofredo. He believes the tools of architecture, analysis and representation can have an Immense impact. ‘The tools of video recording, of filmmaking, of drawing, of model making, are incredibly important to capture power relations and power struggles and very violent modes of existence that characterise the world.’
Godofredo joined the RCA in 2015 to run ADS7, a studio focused on ecologies of living and designing architecture as a collective political practice. As well as leading the MA Environmental Architecture programme, he leads the Architecture and Social Movements Research group examining the practical, conceptual and disciplinary questions that social movements present to architecture, and which has recently launched a partnership with Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common).