Architecture as protagonist in a collapsing world

Abstract

This article proposes a debate and reflection on the protagonism of architecture in the
collapsing world. Protagonist in the processes of degradation and extractive socioenvironmental
exploitation, in a cartesian, developmental scientific model, and at the
same time potential protagonist of systemic alternatives that contribute to the reversal
of the processes of exhaustion of the capacity to support life on the planet. To this end,
it establishes a dominant and beginning temporal arc of this process as the beginning
of the Anthropocene, around 1610, according to the reading and analysis proposed by
Lewis and Maslin (2015), relating this milestone to the beginning of the Sixth Great
Extinction, as presented by Elizabeth Kolbert (2015). From this perspective, it presents
a reflection on the expressions of this dominant paradigm, its transformations, and
contradictions, until the moment of rupture and glimpses of a new possible world.