Conferencia de Ciro Miguel. 09/04/2026

Lecture by Ciro Miguel Title: White Buildings, Red Dust: Brasília in Color Presentation: Darío Graschinsky Organized by: Center for Studies in Contemporary Architecture The red dust of Brasília is everywhere. This lecture will analyze how that red dust, generated during the construction of Brazil's new capital in the late 1950s, compromised the whiteness of its emerging architecture and distorted its meaning as an emblem of progress in the mass media. Ciro Miguel is an architect, photographer, and curator based in Zurich and São Paulo. His work explores alternative narratives of the built environment, using photography and visual archives. As a photographer, his work focuses on the everyday nature of architecture, on how buildings are inhabited, appropriated, and maintained over time. Miguel is an architect, having graduated from the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP). He holds a master's degree from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University and a doctorate from the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich). At ETH Zurich, he also taught alongside Angelo Bucci (2013) and Marc Angélil (2014-2019). He has been a partner at SPBR arquitetos / Angelo Bucci in São Paulo and a collaborator at Bernard Tschumi Architects in New York. In 2019, he curated “Todo dia / Everyday,” the 12th São Paulo International Architecture Biennial. His work has been featured in numerous international exhibitions. In 2025, she created the commissioned installation and video for Vers une Architecture in Teaching at the Museum für Gestaltung / Pavillon Le Corbusier in Zurich. In 2024, she produced commissioned videos for Constructed Geographies: Paulo Mendes da Rocha at Casa da Arquitectura in Porto. In 2022, she participated in Vilanova Artigas – Drawing Models, with research and photography exhibited at Architekturforum Zürich and Forum d’Architectures Lausanne. She recently published “Staging Civicness in Brasília” (Materia Arquitectura, no. 29, 2025), “An Iconic Order: Oscar Niemeyer’s Columns” (ARQ, no. 119, 2025), and “Pinacoteca do Estado,” in Constructed Geographies: Paulo Mendes da Rocha (Casa da Arquitectura/Yale Press, 2024). He is co-editor of publications such as gta papers Amazônía (gta Verlag, 2024), Everyday Matters: Contemporary Approaches to Architecture (Ruby Press, 2022), Terrestrial Tales: 100+ Takes on Earth (Ruby Press, 2019), and Access for All: São Paulo’s Architectural Infrastructures (Park Books, 2019). 0:00:00 Introduction by Javier Agustín Rojas, Director of CEAC 00:04:48 Presentation by Darío Graschinsky, Assistant Professor at EAEU 00:09:27 Lecture by Ciro Miguel 01:00:23 Questions and Answers Video: Center for Studies in Contemporary Architecture Coordination: Violeta Mastronardi Editing: Juliana Gonzalez