The current urban situation at the customs dock is peculiar: the Candelária Cathedral marks an axis that extends to the dock, where the old pier and its warehouses have a delicate scale, forming a water square, a negotiation point in the historic center of the city with the sea. In order not to break this relationship, small interventions are proposed in the dock and the old shed, adapting them to new uses and designing the museum space, with its very specific technical and dimensional requirements, in a new building, to be built beyond the pier. In this sense, it performs an inversion: it brings the boats to the city and takes the museum to the sea.

The new building then configures itself almost like a moored vessel. The construction technique draws its architecture: the sheet piles that make up the embankment, rise beyond the covering slabs, and remind, for those who see the Museum from Candelária, the dark masts of the ships of yesteryear, and mark the presence, in an insinuating way, of a new occupation beyond the dock.

In the inverse measure in which it seeks to maintain the scale of the old dock next to the city, the new museum seeks to create a marked image in Guanabara Bay: the irregular and ascending profile of the sheet piles creates a unique, mysterious and insinuating image of the museum in scale metropolitan bay.

Team:
Architecture Office: Obra Arquitetos + NNarq
Architects In Charge: João Paulo Daolio and Baldomero Navarro
Collaborators: Jéssika França, Vitor Berge Sato, Lilian Lewand, Rafael Gambale and Kawani Nishimura