1 A MUSEUM FOR
RIO AND ITS NEW
AGE

Everyone who lands at a port – any port – has the awareness, if not the vision, that a future is about to unfold. They sense that this future is not something distant in time and abstract: it begins now, always at the moment in which one’s feet, previously on the deck of a ship, in the uncertainty (and infinite possibilities) of the sea, touch the well-trodden stones of the quay, as in a famous samba song.

For many of the men and women who have arrived at the Port of Rio de Janeiro over time, the future and its possibilities often seemed uncertain. However, despite the inevitably unpromising setting, it was these men and women who to a large extent built the city of Rio and left a legacy of art, religion, science, culture – everything, in short, that human ingenuity is capable of creating.

One of the greatest legacies of the revitalization of Rio’s port region is certainly the opportunity to reexamine this history. Today, thanks to the thorough archeological and historical work undertaken at the quay and in the surrounding area, we have a deeper and better understanding of the trajectory of a large share of Rio’s population. We know it was the world’s biggest entry port for African slaves, and as a result we are well aware of what tomorrow and its possibilities may represent. Above all, we recognize its creative and transformational power.

Like a ship docking at Pier Mauá, the Museum of Tomorrow continues in this manner of those landing at the quay: it thinks, dares, dreams, designs and sees different possibilities for the future. And it does so from the perspective of science. It is a museum of applied science based on the urgency of the present, encouraging reflection about the various possibilities of tomorrow. As a consequence, it provokes action to arrive at the tomorrow we want.

We now live in the Anthropocene Era: human action, whether individual or collective, generates impacts of geological dimensions on the planet. The Museum of Tomorrow is built upon this concept. With this awareness, we can understand how humanity got here and what futures are possible based on present actions.

Erected in an area with a historical vocation in the midst of an ambitious urban renewal process promoted by Rio de Janeiro’s city government, the Museum of Tomorrow is part of a port zone transformed into a kind of nodal point, not just in terms of the transport network, but also driving the city forward: from how it has been so far toward what it intends to be. It is therefore a real place of connection between the past and future.

“The revitalization of the port region represents a recovery of our history. It is a city that looks to the future while preserving its past. The new Praça Mauá is self-explanatory, open, illuminated. The square is strengthened by the Rio Museum of Art (MAR) and the Museum of Tomorrow, promoting integration between Rio’s residents, landscape, history, culture and leisure, set against the unique backdrop of Guanabara Bay, which gave birth to the city”, says Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes.

Originally designed to occupy two empty warehouses (numbers five and six), the plans for the Museum of Tomorrow changed when the city government proposed that the Roberto Marinho Foundation transfer its project to a new site: Pier Mauá. Not by chance, it is located across from MAR, forming a cultural arc that embraces the new renovated Praça Mauá.

“In an ever more urban world, one of humanity’s great challenges is the way we occupy cities. The Museum of Tomorrow symbolizes the revitalization of an important part of the Port of Rio. Since construction work began, it has spurred reflection about what we expect of the city: a more integrated place with more generous public spaces”, explains Mayor Paes.

The Roberto Marinho Foundation designed both museums, MAR and the Museum of Tomorrow, precisely to act as cultural anchors to revitalize the port region. Two of the main dimensions of human knowledge, art and science, are symbolically together in the efforts to regenerate a derelict area.

This is the profound sense that the Roberto Marinho Foundation places on an apparently simple task, to “make a museum.” Making a museum in the Brazilian cultural context means looking at a site that needs to be recovered, thinking about the most suitable urban development and architectural proposal, choosing a theme and the best way to transform it into a contemporary narrative, ensuring its sustainability over time and in its relationships with the environment and community, and finally delivering a cultural facility that combines education with entertainment. Now that this complex project has been completed, the museum is opening its doors to fulfill the mission of all museums: to preserve and display a “muse.” In the case of Museum of Tomorrow, this muse is our own shared tomorrow and the world we want to bequeath.

The Roberto Marinho Foundation’s vocation to create museums has been developed in nearly 40 years of activity, initially dedicated to restoring built heritage and preserving colonial legacies. Little by little, the institution perceived that to best celebrate Brazilian culture, it was necessary to also work on non-material heritage.

“We found that the best way to preserve was to give new life and add new content to these public buildings and monuments in the country, balancing material and non-material heritage, as seen in the establishment of the Museum of the Portuguese Language in Estação da Luz, a former train station in São Paulo”, says José Roberto Marinho, the foundation’s president.

The Museum of Tomorrow was created to be a living organism, in which multiple activities meet, associate and update themselves constantly, to guarantee a unique experience for each visitor.

In partnership with public and private institutions, the foundation designed the first museum in the world dedicated to a language, the Museum of the Portuguese Language. It celebrated soccer as a social phenomenon linked to the country’s history and culture in the Museum of Soccer. Through Paço do Frevo, it paid tribute to the frevo rhythm, which is part of humanity’s non-material heritage as a cultural manifestation deserving of a space to be celebrated the whole year and not just during carnival. It brought together art and education through the bold conception of a museum (MAR) with a school alongside it (or a school with a museum alongside it). And now, in addition to this Museum of Tomorrow, the foundation is preparing the Museum of Images and Sounds on Copacabana Beach, to celebrate Brazilian culture through the artistic creativity of Rio de Janeiro.

“The Roberto Marinho Foundation has designed and executed and the Globo Group has directly supported the implementation of some of Brazil’s leading museums and cultural centers in recent years”, says Roberto Irineu Marinho, the president of the Globo Group. “This demonstrates our love of Brazilian culture, which is in everything we do, including our everyday lives, in newspapers, radio, TV, internet, etc. On any platform, our connection with Brazilian culture is clear. In museums, this gains an even larger dimension, given that we have participated in designing, co-funding and divulgation work, at all stages of the process.”

With regard to the Museum of Tomorrow, one of the assumptions was to develop a new, original science museum in Rio de Janeiro. “We can say that there are two generations of science museums”, explains José Roberto Marinho, noting that the first is that of natural history museums, focused on the remains of the past. The second generation, whose most iconic examples are the La Villette Museum in Paris and CosmoCaixa in Barcelona, reproduces the phenomena of nature on a laboratory scale. “A third-generation museum would be constructed from a collection of possibilities. So, we thought: why don’t we work on its approach to prospects for the future we desire for civilization, for relations between humans, and for relations between humans and nature? Our aim was to offer visitors ethical reflection about the tomorrow we want to build”, he adds.

According to Hugo Barreto, the Roberto Marinho Foundation’s general secretary, the Museum of Tomorrow is an invitation for reflection and transformation. “The symbiosis between MAR and the Museum of Tomorrow determines the regeneration of Praça Mauá and values the importance of this area, including the promenades created at the feet of São Bento Hill and along the sea. An environment is being formed that invites people to change their attitude to the city and those living in it. It calls for a shift in attitude in relation to the planet itself, or our own way of ‘being’ on it”, notes Barreto.

The Roberto Marinho Foundation, whose model is to work in partnership with public and private institutions, joined with Rio de Janeiro city government to create this set of museums – MAR, which opened in 2013, and this Museum of Tomorrow, two years later. The project is also supported by the state and federal governments, on various levels.

Santander Bank andBG Brasil are the project’s core private partners, providing not only financial resources, but also specialist knowledge and networks of relationships throughout the project’s design, execution and sustainability work.

Inspired bybromeliads in Rio’s Botanical Garden, Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava created a design in tune with the exuberance of the region’s landscape and historical importance. “We took care to ensure that the museum was inserted in an organic way in the creative process of the city’s formation and growth”, says Lucia Basto, the Roberto Marinho Foundation’s heritage and culture general manager, mentioning the two buildings she considers to be striking in the surrounding area: São Bento Monastery, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2014; and the building formerly occupied by the “A Noite” newspaper, in Praça Mauá, the first skyscraper in Latin America and the historic home of Rádio Nacional.

The singular character of Santiago Calatrava’s design represented an engineering challenge. Although the concrete structure presents a certain symmetry, its curves are not repeated in the same way, and each component seems unique. With gardens designed to occupy an area along the museum and commissioned from the Burle Marx landscaping office, the architect aimed to recreate and integrate the outdoor space with a little of the Atlantic Forest. The 30,000 m2 external area includes gardens, reflecting pools, a bike path and an area for leisure.

Structured on two levels, adding up to a floor area of 15,000 m2, the Museum of Tomorrow hosts a main exhibition space in its upper part, with a ceiling height of 10 meters. The long-term exhibition is divided into five principal areas: Cosmos, Earth, Anthropocene, Tomorrows and Us. They result in more than 50 immersive, audiovisual experiences and interactive games, integrated with the Laboratory of Tomorrow’s Activities, which brings together science, technology and art in a collective environment for experimentation, and the Observatory of Tomorrow, which through a system called a “Brain” receives data from scientific institutions across the world.

Like the other museums conceived by the Roberto Marinho Foundation and its partners, the Museum of Tomorrow was created to be a living organism, in which multiple activities meet, associate and update themselves constantly, to guarantee a unique experience for each visitor.

Attention to the environment was born together with the museum. The steel structure that covers the building features panels that capture solar energy and accompany the sun’s movement; the reflecting pools next to the museum are part of a system that filters sea water to be used to cool the building, before returning it to the bay, now clean, in a small cascade at the end of the pier. “In this way we wanted to express a little of the desire to one day have a perfectly clean bay”, explains Lucia Basto.

The Museum of Tomorrow looks set to become a bridge between the city and the world, and between the city and its own tomorrow.

Due to its architecture, content and location, on the edge of the bay, the Museum of Tomorrow looks set to become a bridge between the city and the world, and between the city and its own tomorrow. From now on, people who land at the Port of Rio, coming from the uncertainties of the sea and stepping onto the quay, may not find certainties, but rather a space in which doubts about tomorrow may be converted into pure transformative energy.