Niterói Contemporary Art Museum

In Niterói, Oscar Niemeyer let the site do half the work. On a rocky promontory above Boa Viagem beach, across Guanabara Bay from Rio de Janeiro, a white concrete saucer seems to have just landed on a single stem, its rim flaring outward over a shallow pool. The view it frames is one of the great urban panoramas of the world: the bay, the skyline of Rio and the Sugarloaf rising on the far shore.

The museum was completed in 1996, when Niemeyer was already in his late eighties, and designed with the structural engineer Bruno Contarini, a longtime collaborator. The building is about 16 metres tall, with a cupola some 50 metres across holding three floors of space. Its base sits in a reflecting pool of 817 square metres, which Niemeyer compared to a flower — the pool doubling the white form and making the thin support seem even thinner.

The approach is choreographed like a piece of theatre. A red-surfaced ramp nearly a hundred metres long swirls out from the building across the paved square and back up to the entrance, so that visitors circle the museum, seeing it from changing angles before they arrive. Inside, a viewing promenade with angled windows rings the main hall, turning the bay into a panorama that competes openly with the art on the walls.

The collection is serious in its own right. Its core is some 1,200 works from the collection of João Sattamini, among the largest holdings of Brazilian contemporary art. But most people come for the building and the view, and the best moment is late afternoon, when the concrete takes on the colour of the sky and the city across the water begins to light up.

Getting there

The museum is on the Boa Viagem shore of Niterói, about 3.6 km from the city centre. The classic route from Rio is the ferry from Praça XV in downtown Rio to Praça Araribóia in Niterói, a crossing of around twenty minutes, followed by a short bus ride (line 47B) to the museum. Santos Dumont Airport (SDU), Rio's city airport, lies about 4 km away across the bay in a straight line; by land the route runs over the Rio–Niterói Bridge.