Non-Timber Forest Materials for Civil Construction

2025

Belém, Pará, Brasil.

Most of what is built in the Amazon is not of the Amazon. Timber, cement and steel travel thousands of kilometres, carrying their own carbon footprint into a region that already sustains the world through its forest. Brazil is the world's largest producer of açaí, with over 1.1 million tons harvested each year, most of it in the state of Pará, where the chain supports around 150,000 extractivist and family-farming households, according to CONAB and the 2017 IBGE Agricultural Census. In Belém do Pará, this ongoing research, funded by the Ammodo Architecture Award, explores how the residues of sustainable açaí and castor-oil extractivism can be transformed into chipboard panels for civil construction, turning local non-timber forest products into the very matter of the built environment. By giving new purpose to the açaí seed, discarded during processing, the panels generate added value within the local construction sector and contribute to the income of the families who harvest the fruit. The work was published in PLOT Special Edition 21, Suelos, Ecologías, Territorios, Comunidades [Soils, Ecologies, Territories, Communities], and results were presented at Um Rio Não Existe Sozinho [A River Does Not Exist Alone], curated by Sabrina Fontenele and Vania Leal at the Museu Emílio Goeldi during COP30, a project created and developed by the Instituto Tomie Ohtake.

Photographs © Pedro Kok / Noelia Monteiro / Instituto Tomie Ohtake