The Museum of Tomorrow Looks Like It Arrived From One

Santiago Calatrava designed the Museu do Amanhã on Pier Mauá to resemble a prehistoric fish skeleton reaching over Guanabara Bay with solar-powered fins tracking the sun. Absurd and beautiful and impossible to ignore — a museum about the future should look like it arrived from one.

The exhibits are organized around questions, not objects: Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? The Anthropocene room — a sphere of projected video showing Earth's systems in real-time — is the most beautiful and unsettling exhibit, because watching the planet breathe while standing at sea level makes the abstract specifically personal.

The Kobra mural on the adjacent warehouse — five-story Indigenous faces from five continents, world's largest graffiti mural — makes the walk to the museum feel like a gallery. The reflecting pool at the museum's bay end doubles the building and Sugarloaf Mountain in a composition so precise it feels like Calatrava bribed the geography. Most visitors enter from the landward side and miss it.