GGIS Colloquium | Amphibious Cosmograms: Bodies, Territory, and Built Form

Amphibious Cosmograms: Bodies, Territory, and Built Form
Urban spaces are often read through conventions of design and planning that privilege clear boundaries, stable ground, continuous form, and cadastral certainty. Yet cities formed at shifting thresholds of land and water rarely conform to these terms. An amphibious cosmogram offers one such lens: reading the built form as the material expression of a world and the relationships among people, water, land, and other beings. It is not symbolism added to a structure, but the structure itself understood as a statement about how the world is arranged: Where is the ground? What counts as inside? What does a building owe to water? 

This cosmogram, therefore, emerges in a process in which embodied experiences are inseparable from the land. In this approach, the built environment is seen as an arrangement binding bodies to changing territories rather than as a stock of objects laid over stable ground. This shifts design from protecting bodies against terrain to shaping worlds those bodies already sustain.

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David J. Isern is a Peruvian architect, multidisciplinary designer, and educator who focuses and works on the transversality of space, heritage, and food and in the intersections of cultural traditions, urban memory, and gender across the Americas. His work engages with decolonial, feminist, and insurgent theories that provide a foundation for understanding and applying everchanging practices in the urban ayllu (community). Illinois Faculty page