THE ARCHITECTURE OF INDIGENOUS' SCHOOLS AS PLACES OF IDENTIFICATION

This article presents specific school architecture for indigenous peoples as the materialization of a new attitude from these communities towards the school, which started to consider school education as a tool for the accomplishment of their rights as the result of the Brazilian Constitution of 1988 and its subsequent legislation . In this scenario, the school architecture that starts to be built in the villages as the result of listening to the communities’ aspirations attempts to interpret and present cultural elements that strengthen the identity and peculiarities of each people and place. We performed an exploratory research with the intent to know some cases in which the indigenous communities’ requirements were heard so that they could build places for the school education and imprint their cultural expressions on them, turning the school into a place of identification . In the article, we present three examples of school architecture developed with indigenous communities from the south and the southeastern regions of the country. Employing a qualitative approach, we resorted to bibliographic references, media publications, field research (observation and interviews), and documentary analysis (blueprint projects and descriptive reports). We consider that the schools referred to, whose architectural conception involved the participation of indigenous representatives, can be regarded as places of identification, expressing symbolic representations.