MMBB, JPG.ARQ and Ben-Avid Flood Brazil's Expo 2020 Dubai Pavilion with a Walkable Sheet of Water

Most national pavilions at a world expo compete for attention with height, spectacle or a signature silhouette. The Brazil Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai, designed by MMBB Arquitetos, JPG.ARQ and Ben-Avid, takes a quieter and more physical route. It wraps a simple steel frame in white tensile fabric and fills the ground beneath it with a thin layer of water. The building is a container. The flooded floor is the event.

The concept comes from the river flood, the seasonal overflow that defines the Amazon and Brazil's mangrove coasts. Instead of illustrating that idea on a wall, the team literally floods the plot. You walk into the water, and the fabric overhead becomes a screen for Brazilian landscapes, layered with sound, aromas and shifting temperatures. In a desert city, that is a pointed and effective choice: the architecture turns a national theme into something your feet register before your eyes do.

Flooding Brazil's Plot in Dubai

From the outside, the pavilion reads as a translucent box with diagonal bracing, rising roughly 18.5 to 18.8 metres depending on the source and about 48 metres wide. At dusk it glows like a lantern over its own reflection. The form is deliberately plain, and we think that restraint is the right call. A complex outer shape would have competed with the experience inside; a clean box lets the water and the light carry the identity.

The structure explains the calm. A two-level internal volume carries trusses along both long facades, each supported on just two pillars, which lets the volume cantilever generously and seem to stand on stilts over the pool. The tensile membrane, engineered with Rui Pauletti, stretches over the steel frame. A large void at the centre keeps the public route continuous, so the square under the roof works as one connected space rather than a sequence of rooms.

Wading Is the Exhibition

The images that stay with you show visitors in the water, not looking at displays. Children in raincoats cross the shallow pool through mist; a girl in a swimsuit splashes under the open sky visible through the round skylight. This is a pavilion that invites misbehaviour, and that is its strength. Expos usually choreograph visitors into queues and viewing points. Here, people sit, play and linger, and the theme of water becomes something lived rather than something explained.

A continuous path of anti-slip black concrete crosses the surface, so visitors who prefer to stay dry can still pass through. The dark line against pale water and white fabric is a sharp graphic move, and it gives the open square a clear direction without walls or barriers.

The Membrane as Screen, Scent and Climate

The fabric works as a projection surface. Clouds, rocky islets and aerial views of forest cut by winding rivers spread across the angled walls and ceiling, and the shallow water doubles them below. The renderings show how directly the design team planned this: the tilted enclosure is a screen sized for landscape, not for text panels.

What lifts it beyond a projection room is the coordination of senses. Aromas and temperature changes are built into the visit, and the hardware that produces them is kept out of sight: fire-water tank, air conditioning, projectors, speakers and aroma sprinklers. Hiding that equipment is essential to the effect. Once you notice the machinery, the illusion of a flooded Brazilian landscape breaks; here it holds.

A Dry Edge for Eating and Gathering

The café, restaurant and shop sit on the dry parts of the square, separated from the pool by a black stone edge under the tall translucent wall. The commercial program, usually the dullest part of an expo pavilion, gains a lot from this placement. Diners face the water and the people in it, so eating becomes part of watching the exhibition.

Upstairs, the first floor holds a multipurpose room for lectures, debates, film screenings and small performances. That room gives the pavilion a cultural program beyond the immersive floor, which matters for a building that has to stay relevant across a six-month event.

Plans and Drawings

The ground floor plan, drawn at 1:250, shows the logic clearly: a service core and restaurant tables pushed to the edges, a circular information desk, and a long walkway running across the water. At level 3.05, a block of small rooms sits above the multipurpose hall with its rows of seating. Level 6.10 places offices and meeting rooms beside the large rectangular void, which keeps the centre of the building open from floor to roof.

The roof plan shows the diamond-patterned structural grid and the circular opening that functions as an impluvium, the classic courtyard roof that gathers sky and rain toward the centre. Reading the drawings together, you see how few elements the project needs: a frame, a skin, a void and a pool.

Why This Project Matters

Expo pavilions are temporary, and too many of them treat that as permission for empty spectacle. The Brazil Pavilion uses its short life well. It makes one clear spatial claim, that the visitor should stand in the theme, and it organises structure, program and services around protecting that experience. Water serves as both an image of Brazil and a starting point for a conversation about sustainability, and the conversation lands better because it starts with wet feet.

For designers, the lesson is about economy of means. A lightweight tensile envelope, a shallow pool and well-hidden technical systems produce an experience richer than many heavier, costlier buildings on the same grounds. The open question is whether flooding a plot in a desert city is a responsible gesture. The pavilion invites that debate rather than avoiding it, and that alone sets it apart from most national showcases.

Brazil Pavilion at EXPO Dubai 2020 by MMBB Arquitetos, JPG.ARQ and Ben-Avid. Location: Expo 2020 Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Area: approximately 3,772 to 4,445 m², depending on source. Year: 2021. Client: Apex-Brasil. Tensile structure: Rui Pauletti. Curators: Guilherme Wisnik and Alexandre Benoit.

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