Martín Cobas: A Stone Fallen From the Moon...or Elsewhere

Spring 2026 Sciame Lecture Series—The Elephant in the Room: Locating Animal Lives in Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes

This in-person lecture is part of the Spring 2026 Sciame Lecture Series, "The Elephant in the Room: Locating Animal Lives in Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes."

Martín Cobas is Professor of Architectural History and Design and Co-director of the Ph.D. Program in Architecture at the School of Architecture, Design, and Urbanism (FADU) of the Universidad de la República (Montevideo), where he previously served as Chair of the Department of Architectural History and as Associate Dean of Graduate Studies. He has practiced with Fábrica de Paisaje (co-founded in 2007), lectured internationally, and had his scholarship published in specialized journals and edited volumes. Cobas is a founding editor of Vitruvia and is currently working on two book manuscripts. He holds a professional degree in Architecture from FADU-Udelar, a Master's in Design Studies (with Distinction) from Harvard GSD, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Architecture from Princeton University. He was the Fall 2025 Robertson Visiting Professor at the UVA School of Architecture.

"A Stone Fallen From the Moon … or Elsewhere": The rarefied mineral constitution of a meteorite — yet also epiphytic life, or a life-threatening “epidemic” unfolding in the arrière-pays. This talk examines the entangled lives (and afterlifes) of certain object-subjects in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Brazil, tracing their institutional trajectories and the ways in which they mediated between wondrous exoticism and emergent “global” scientific regimes. The remarkable story of the Bendegó Meteorite serves as the protagonist in a broader narrative of modernization, scientific systematization, material geopolitics, asymmetric cosmogonies, and the emergence of new interspecies ecologies. Rather than a passive specimen— condemned to a foreign “deep time” and an extra-telluric provenance — the meteorite, I argue, becomes a micro-ontological diplomat. What would it mean to locate the modern in the “outside” of modernity — in the Amazônia, the Pantanal, or the Sertão? What forms of agency do nonhuman entities exert in shaping our existential domains? How do they mediate a world of ontological unease? At the center of this exploration is the concept of the creaturely. Creaturing, then, becomes a method to reveal and theorize hitherto unexplored alter-ecologies, while foreshadowing lessons we might draw from the “other” in imagining (and designing) worlds of beyond-the-human camaraderie. Not quite a creature, the meteorite nonetheless opens a space of radical alterity from which to explore its vital intimations.