The Federal University of Manaus is a formative exception of the city of Manaus. The campus lies hidden, in the center of the city, within a forest reservation of 600,000 sqft. The forest geographically disconnects the campus from the city, in the same way Manaus is disconnected from its surroundings by the Amazon rainforest. The University, even though distinct from the city, is dependent on the city’s processes, expanding in the same manner in its forest reservation that the city is in the Amazon.

The thesis examines this condition of ‘a city within a city’ and leveraged this campus enclave of the Federal University of Manaus to re-imagine its exterior. The thesis will push the rules and regulations which construct a city to its limit, such that the campus starts to become something ‘other’ - like a space in a heterotopic mirror, which will re-construct our imagination of the city. In this ‘other’ space, everything will be altered using the same familiar rules of built and open space, of public and private space, of glass and of concrete, of justice, of everything architectural and of everything sensory. This other space, uncannily familiar, but completely heterotopic re-imagines the very basis of the neoliberal city.

The campus expansion in the forest reservation is explored as a self reference for the city of Manaus. “From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am.” - Michel Foucault. Of Other Spaces (1967).

Both the enclaves, the city and the campus are interlinked and networked with each other and the rest of the world through the industrial pole of Manaus. As all the enclaves of the city form an intricate relationship with each other, each one of them become formative exceptions of the city. There is a certain fragility in the bursting economy of Manaus. An architectural proposition for the campus expansion has to be carefully crafted so as not to disrupt the interdependence but to help strengthen the exceptional enclaves of Manaus.

As the city is different from its enclaves, it also encompasses them. It forms them, such that they remain different. The city sometimes with its eagerness to grow loses sight, and starts encroaching upon them, and thus making them less effective as spaces of exception. The enclave is a loophole where laws are different and travelling inside and outside is a feat. Here something are allowed, in the city they are not. The expanding campus will camp on these allowances and irregularities, which will address the pros and cons of the fragile city of Manaus.

The plan adopts the rules and aberrations as defined by the project and starts to observe them on a larger grid in the Amazonian rainforest. A varied unexpected moments, with the base functions, making the space enigmatically uncanny. These forced interactions between dissimilar programs leads to abnormal transformations and adaptations of simple rules. Slowly the whole campus becomes dynamically aberrant, a new imagination of a city we are already used to. The project is perceivable, and yet critical, sometimes accepting of the neoliberal world we exist in.