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The paper is part of a broader research dedicated to bring out keyissues related to the architectural and design practice in Brazil during two seminal decades - the 1950’s and the 1960’s. This turbulent and very dynamic period comprises the emergence of Brazilian concrete art and poetry, Bossa Nova and Cinema Novo, the establishment of industrial design as a discipline and the building of Brasília, Brazil’s new capital, accompanied by a political dispute between different perspectives for the country’s development. By concentrating the analysis here upon the creation of Esdi/ Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (College of Industrial Design, Rio de Janeiro), in 1963, the aim is to address some of the tensions, limits and different interpretations of the construcivist trend in Brazil, in regard to a concept of design deeply rooted in the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG), school of design created in Ulm under the influence of the reformist agenda of postwar Germany. In this light, rather than trace the creation of Esdi, which has been richly chronicled elsewhere, this paper intends to reexamine and even challenge the major attention this episode has received in design historiography (being, in turn, completely ignored by architectural studies) by considering both the existing tensions between design practices and mass production in Brazil, and the ambiguities of a school originated inside an avant-garde institution such as MAM/Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, but finally supported and advocated by a government such as the one of Carlos Lacerda, the first governor of state of Guanabara, created after Brazilian capital was transfered to Brasilia. Essentially opposed to the call for social reforms rooted in german design, Lacerda embraced – as a “project of national interest” - what is an undeniable seminal school of design in Latin America, but also a paradigm for many contradictions and complexities involved in the specific context in which dramatic and unprecedent changes were soon to be experienced.