Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro

The Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro is a museum located in northeastern Flamengo Park, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is in the Centro district, west of Santos Dumont Airport, on Guanabara Bay.ArchitectureFlamengo Park was an urban planning project on the coast of Rio under the direction of Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994) in the 1950s and 1960s. The Modernist concrete museum building, designed by Affonso Eduardo Reidy (1909-1964), was completed in 1955. The museum's landmark Modernist gardens were designed by Burle Marx.The main building has a dramatic cadence of external pillar elements, connected by longitudinal beams, providing a galley level free of internal columns or structural walls. The park was created on landfill in the bay, so the pillars footings reach 20m down.A large outdoor terrace is framed by the entrance façades of the main building and theater wing. The northern façade has aluminum shutters to control the amount of (low) natural light entering the gallery space during the winter solstice period. The windows of the gallery are oriented to the north and south.Anner courtyard was also designed by Burle Marx. A broad spiral ramp element reaches an upper level, with a roof terrace, restaurant, bar, and lounge overlooking Guanabara Bay, Sugarloaf, and Rio's other granitic mountain formations.