Museum of Tomorrow — science museum
Image by LyraSid from Pixabay

Museum of Tomorrow

Museu do Amanhã

  • 2 min read
  • 22.894° S 43.179° W

Interesting facts

  • The only physical artefact in the main exhibition is a wooden churinga, a sacred object of Aboriginal Australians about two metres tall, found in a Paris antiques shop.
  • The museum presents itself as a 'third-generation' science museum: instead of relics of the past or evidence of the present, it explores possible futures.
  • Building it cost roughly 230 million reais, with support from the Roberto Marinho Foundation, and about 25,000 people visited on its first weekend.
  • Calatrava's building earned LEED Gold certification, and in 2017 it won the MIPIM Award for Best Innovative Green Building for its solar fins and bay-water cooling.
  • The main exhibition holds more than 40 experiences in Portuguese, Spanish and English, and received 234 content updates in its first year and a half.
  • Exhibits draw on real-time data about climate and population from space agencies and the United Nations, so the displays change as the world does.
  • The domed Cosmos film was made by the Brazilian studio O2 Filmes and is deliberately shown without subtitles so nothing distracts from the projection.
  • The Anthropocene section takes its name from the term popularised by Paul Crutzen, the atmospheric chemist who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
  • The museum's opening went hand in hand with the demolition of the Perimetral, an elevated highway that had cut Rio's old port off from the water.

Why it is worth it

The Museum of Tomorrow stands at the end of Pier Mauá in Rio de Janeiro, reaching out into Guanabara Bay like a skeleton of white steel. It was designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, who said he drew inspiration from the bromeliads of Rio's botanical garden, and it opened on 17 December 2015. The building was an anchor of Porto Maravilha, the project that reclaimed Rio's run-down port district in the years before the 2016 Olympics, and it quickly became one of the city's new landmarks.

The long, low building covers some 15,000 square metres, set in about 30,000 square metres of gardens, reflecting pools and a cycle path on the old pier. Its roof carries great steel fins that move like wings through the day, following the sun and carrying solar panels; water from the bay is used to cool the interior and then returned through the pools. In front of the museum, in the water facing the bay, stands Frank Stella's Puffed Star II, a twenty-pointed metal star six metres across that was donated to the museum in 2015.

Inside, the museum is less a collection of objects than a single argument. The main exhibition, conceived by the cosmologist Luiz Alberto Oliveira, leads visitors through five spaces: Cosmos, a domed room with an eight-minute film on the origins of the universe and of life; Earth, three seven-metre cubes on matter, life and thought; the Anthropocene, a ring of ten-metre video totems on how humanity has changed the planet; Tomorrows, with games that ask visitors to manage the Earth's resources over fifty years; and Us, a space modelled on an Indigenous house where light rises and fades like dawn and dusk. The theme throughout is the choices that will shape the coming decades — climate, sustainability, how we live together.

Getting there

The museum is at Praça Mauá in central Rio de Janeiro. The VLT light rail line 1 runs directly from Santos Dumont Airport (SDU), about 2.5 km away, to the Parada dos Museus stop, some 200 metres from the entrance. The nearest metro station is Uruguaiana, a 15–20 minute walk. For international flights, Rio's main airport is Galeão.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Rio de Janeiro 12The Most Beautiful Places in Brazil 44The Most Remarkable Science Museums 17The Most Beautiful Buildings 286

From the encyclopaedia

The Museum of Tomorrow is a science museum in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It was designed by Spanish neofuturistic architect Santiago Calatrava, and built next to the waterfront at Pier Maua. Its construction was supported by the Roberto Marinho Foundation and cost approximately 230 million reais. The building was opened on 17 December 2015, with President Dilma Rousseff in attendance.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

-22.89413, -43.17940per Wikidata