In 2010 Brasilia turns 50, reminding us of its founder President Kubitschek's famous campaign promise to achieve 50 years of development in 5. In the last 50 years, the world's 5th largest country has evolved, yet its capital city remains frozen in time. How can we update Brasilia without spoiling it? Students designed new annexes to the ministries, overlaying an alternate future for Brasilia's architecture upon the 1960 master plan. Each project considered how the locus of power and monument at the scale of a city could be transformed through their specific architectural interventions, based on three paradoxes:

1) Government ministry functions are decentralizing - an unanticipated phenomenon in 1957 when Brazil established its new center. The opportunity to occupy the void left behind by the departing bureaucrats allowed the students to reinvent the ministry annexes - buildings originally designed to absorb the now placeless back-of-house functions - as buildings with an updated political and social agenda. "Back" became the new "Front".

2) Brasilia's master plan is protected by UNESCO, yet its individual buildings are generally not protected, so long as replacements forever conform to volumetric dimensions established by Lucio Costa. Our second paradox was to design buildings that resonate with the two Brasilia's: that of our time and the one that is superimposed.

3) Unlike its European counterpart, Brazilian Modern architecture was almost exclusively produced with concrete, deriving from it the seemingly opposing qualities of monumentality, plastic expression, permanence, and gravitational freedom. Our third paradox therefore was to use this traditionally heavy and massive material in an innovative way.



Mark Bearak
Alejandro de Castro
Jessica Dobkin
Jesus Donaire Garcia de la Mora
Benjamin Howell
Iliana Kerestetzi
Prae Lorvidhaya
Adam Mercier
Artemis Papadatou
Tiago Romao de barros
Eleftheria Tzanaki
Tom Wu