The Museum of Tomorrow and the Question the Harbor Asks

The Museu do Amanhã (Museum of Tomorrow) sits on Pier Mauá at the edge of Guanabara Bay, and its architect — Santiago Calatrava — designed it to look like a prehistoric fish skeleton reaching over the water with solar-powered fins that track the sun. The building is absurd and beautiful and impossible to ignore, which may be the point: a museum about the future should look like it arrived from one.

Inside, the exhibits are organized not around objects but around questions: Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? How do we want to get there? The immersive installations use projection, data visualization, and interactive media to explore climate change, urbanization, biodiversity loss, and the ethical questions that emerging technologies are creating faster than societies can answer them. The Anthropocene room — a sphere of projected video showing the Earth's systems in real-time — is both the most beautiful and the most unsettling exhibit, because watching the planet breathe while standing in a city at sea level makes the abstract very specifically personal.

The museum's greatest achievement may be its context. It sits in the Porto Maravilha (Wonder Port) — a formerly derelict port zone that Rio transformed for the 2016 Olympics into a waterfront promenade with museums, murals, and public space. The Kobra mural on the adjacent warehouse — a five-story portrait of Indigenous faces from five continents — is the largest graffiti mural in the world and makes the walk to the museum feel like a gallery in its own right.

What visitors miss: The reflecting pool that surrounds the building. Most visitors enter from the landward side and miss the view from the bay end, where the museum floats above the water and Sugarloaf Mountain rises in the distance, and the reflection in the pool doubles the building and the mountain in a composition that is so precisely beautiful it feels like Calatrava bribed the geography.