Andrea Zalewski

Shaun Patchell

Sponsors: The U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior, Brazil Ministry of Education.

Sustainability has emerged as the central paradigm to address ecological concerns through economic and social equity strategies. The Consortium for Sustainable Urbanism brings these issues front and center by challenging faculty and students to develop trans-disciplinary approaches to improving the quality of life and health of urban communities.   The Consortium emphasizes service learning, community capacity building, and participatory action research and design. The opportunities presented to participating faculty include exchanges with host institutions in Brazil and the U.S. and joint research projects. The Consortium pivots on a student exchange program and is intended to prepare individuals for careers with international agencies and NGOs that focus on urban growth and change. Founding members of the Consortium include Penn State University, University of Brasilia, the State University of New York, and the University of Rio Grande do Sul.   

Providing for Architectural Event in Brasilia
A thesis project by Andrea Zalewski

Through a subterranean non-operational metro station beneath a crucial urban axis of Lucio Costa's Modernist city plan of Brasilia, Brasil, this thesis explores how architectural event can be applied to the re-programming of appropriation of transportation infrastructure. Event is embodied in the architecture by providing dense arrangements and proximities of spatial experiences of various programmatic elements in a manner that subverts or contrasts the contextual ground condition of the city. The program includes a language school and public lecture hall, internet facilities, an international cuisine strip, a recreational/leisure swimming pool, a music club and bar, and parking. Event assumes layers in terms of cross-programming, movement and circulation, time, and usage by diverse social classes.

Centro Communitario de Recolhimento: Villa Varjao Community Gleaning Center
A thesis project by Shaun Patchell

This project began as a critique of the current modern social housing project occurring inside Villa Varjao, a favela community just outside Lucio Costa's Plano Piloto of Brasilia, Brazil. The thesis questions the erasure of cultural identity produced by the social housing and its importation of a suburban middle class aesthetic. A community gleaning center is proposed that focuses on the collection, refurbishment, and redistribution of building materials intrinsic to Varjao. Gleaning is an Old Testament concept that refers to the sharing of one's wealth. As such, the gleaning center serves to reinstitute inherent qualities of the existing community's self-built construction methods through the use of intrinsic/prevalent materials inside Villa Varjao.