This article proposes alternatives for the conceptual scaffolding needed to ecologise architecture production studies. It engages Sérgio Ferro’s seminal work O canteiro e o desenho and expands Ferro’s critique of design’s inherent role in the exploitation the building site by introducing the concept of negative accumulation, the recognition of combined human and nonhuman labour grounding value extraction, and the entropic potential of building technologies. Drawing from Denise Ferreira da Silva’s theory of labour in connection to the transduction of energy, the article reintroduces forms of labour that fall outside the juridical definition of wage work into the calculus of value, and amends Ferro’s original claim for the liberation of construction work with the notions of reparation and restitution. Additionally, it presents the rupture of ecological relations as the grounding action in turning humans and nonhumans into propertied property, as explored by Ferreira da Silva and Kathryn Yusoff. By recognising the combined human and nonhuman labour resulting from mutually exacerbating movements of extraction, the article presents the possibility that design also reassembles previously disaggregated nonhuman labour towards the production of architecture. Finally, it draws on Bernard Stiegler’s work to focus on the entropic tendencies of technics as expressed in the building site and on how the configuration of these sites impacts workers’ style of energy expenditure and individuation. It proposes that the economy of resources in construction should also be understood as an economy of gestures and an economy of energy, and that this perspective can be extended to other sites of production.

The Renaissance was pivotal in expanding, legislating, and transforming the meanings of the blush, as well as in construing it as a marker of racial difference. Tracking the blush across national and conceptual borders offers new perspectives on race-making in the early modern world, where an obsession with the dermal visibility of the blush indexed the construction of whiteness. Yet, by analyzing the use of cosmetic rouge and blushing Black Africans and Afro-diasporic people on stage, this essay also contends that the act of turning red could destabilize race-based hierarchies, even as the blush remains an embodied testament of racial trauma.

This article analyses the impacts of modernisation projects and conservation policies on Traditional territories in Brazil, highlighting the resistance and adaptation strategies developed by rubber tappers, everlasting flower gatherers, vazanteiros, and veredeiros. Critiquing the notions of nature implicit in both modernisation projects and conservation policies, the text draws on decolonial ecology and environmental racism to assess how territorial expropriation and environmental degradation have disproportionately affected Traditional Communities while benefiting exclusionary economic development models. Each case examined illustrates this dynamic based on the historical constitution and way of life of the groups in question. The article argues that conservation policies, by adopting an exclusionary vision of nature, often disregard the knowledge and rights of Traditional Communities, perpetuating social and environmental inequalities. It concludes that biodiversity conservation efforts must integrate the social, cultural, and historical dimensions of local communities, challenging hegemonic logics of development and conservation.