How Guá Arquitetura Brings Amazonian Intelligence to COP30

Architecture is entering a moment in which territory, culture, and environmental awareness shape the direction of design. Around the world, architects are turning their attention to regions where nature and human knowledge have long evolved together. The Amazon is one of these places, a vast landscape where building, living, and adapting have generated practices with the potential to guide more sustainable futures. With COP30 taking place in Belém, this dialogue between architecture and climate responsibility gains a unique global stage.

Guá Arquitetura enters this moment with a perspective grounded in belonging and research. The office highlights the significance of hosting COP30 in the world’s largest rainforest. “The fact that COP30 arrives, only in its 30th edition, to the largest forest in the world is very emblematic. You cannot talk about the planet’s future without including the Amazon,” they say. For them, holding the event in Belém represents “a historical reparation,” allowing the world to experience the forest directly, its atmosphere, its heat, its visible environmental changes. “This forest is not an idea… it exists. The problems exist.”

Their work is built on relationships with Amazonian communities, materials, and traditional knowledge. Guá Arquitetura reinforces that many contemporary environmental strategies resonate with practices that have shaped life in the region for centuries. “The solutions are not only in new technologies, but in ancestral technologies,” they affirm, noting that concepts widely discussed today, such as sponge-city principles, have long been part of Amazonian intelligence.

This approach is central to the third edition of Casa Pará, now presented for the first time in its own state. “It is the first time Casa Pará arrives in Pará, it is the first time we come home,” they share. The curatorship brings together “ancestralities, new materials, or rather, ancestral materials, and sustainability,” and places the miriti pavilion as a key element of this narrative.

The pavilion reflects two and a half years of research into miriti, a renewable Amazonian material. “It is a source of pride,” architects says, pointing to its impact on both design and local communities. “100% biodegradable, six times lighter than MDF, just as resistant… and capable of impacting more than 150 families.”

Presenting this work at COP30 reinforces a clear message: the Amazon holds knowledge capable of shaping new architectural paths, rooted in its territory and ready to engage the world.

_article written by Daniela Moreira da Silva
_interview with guá arquitetura