Wildest dreams

An environmentalist's ambitious project in the Amazon fulfils his vision of powering up the local bioeconomy and saving humanity

- SCOTT MITCHEM

After nearly two decades of work, entrepreneur and environmentalist Luiz Felipe Aranha Moura is launching his plan to bring the municipality of Belterra, Brazil, back to the future. His visionary new Museu de Ciência da Amazônia, also known as MuCA, or the Museum of Amazonian Science, is an ambitious project that builds on fascinating local history, and has been made possible with the help of a team of high-powered collaborators, including the celebrated Brazilian architect Arthur Casas.

Belterra was created by Henry Ford in 1933. The American car manufacturer was trying to establish independent large-scale rubber production for his company, having unsuccessfully attempted to create a utopian city called Fordlandia in the heart of the Amazon five years earlier. He took the learnings from the missteps that led to Fordlandia’s resounding failure and doubled down, building what became Belterra in the image of his home town of Dearborn, Michigan. As a result, the city was laid out like an early American suburb, with hundreds of wooden buildings arranged in rows off a main street, uniform in white and emerald green and in contrast with the typical architecture of the local Tapajós culture.

While Belterra was more successful than its predecessor, the Ford Motor Company ultimately abandoned both operations when rubber production in Asia resumed after World War II, leaving behind an idiosyncratic architectural legacy tainted by Ford’s insistence on imposing American ways of working and living on the local populations.