Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro

Listen first. Behind you, traffic moves along the coastal highway. In front of you, wind comes off the water of Guanabara Bay and moves through palm leaves. And above you, a long body of raw concrete floats on slanted legs, casting a wide band of shade across the lawn. You can walk straight underneath it. Few museums let you do that. Here, the building lifts itself off the ground and gives the space back to the park.

This is the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, known across Brazil simply as MAM Rio. The institution was founded in 1948, in the years after the Second World War. Brazil was changing fast. Cities were growing, industry was expanding, and a new generation wanted art that matched that energy. A group of collectors and patrons decided that Rio, then the capital of the country, needed a home for modern art.

The building came from the architect Affonso Eduardo Reidy, one of the central figures of Brazilian modernism. Look at the structure in front of you. The main exhibition block rests on a series of angled concrete frames, shaped a little like the letter V. These frames carry the weight outside the walls. That means the galleries inside can stay open, with no columns in the way. The engineering is visible, honest, and repeated in a steady rhythm.

The material matters here. This is exposed concrete — concrete left bare after the wooden moulds were removed. If you walk close and look carefully, you can still see the faint lines of the timber boards pressed into the surface. Each panel carries the grain of wood that was taken away decades ago. In the strong Rio sun, those small marks catch the light and give a grey wall a surprising warmth.

Now think about the ground you are standing on. Much of this park did not exist when the museum was planned. The area was created by landfill, pushed out into the bay during the middle of the twentieth century. Earth from a levelled hill nearby helped build it. So this lawn, these paths, and even the museum's foundations sit on land that was once open water. It is a surprise many visitors never hear.

The gardens around you were designed by Roberto Burle Marx, Brazil's most celebrated landscape architect. He was also a painter, and you can feel that in the way he worked. He used native Brazilian plants at a time when many gardens copied European models. He drew paths and lawns like brushstrokes, with bold curves and blocks of colour. Walk the grounds slowly, and the garden starts to feel like an artwork placed beside the museum, not simply around it.

Go to the open ground floor beneath the main block and turn toward the water. The building works like a giant frame. Between the concrete legs, you see the bay, the boats, and on a clear day, the rounded granite peak of Sugarloaf Mountain. Reidy wanted the museum to stay connected to the city and the landscape. Standing here, the line between inside and outside almost disappears.

The museum's history includes a painful chapter. In 1978, a fire broke out inside the building. It destroyed the large majority of the collection held there at the time. Among the losses were works by major modern artists from Latin America and Europe. For a young museum, this was a devastating blow. Paintings that had taken years to gather were gone in a single night.

But the museum did not close for good. Over the following decades, it rebuilt its collection piece by piece, through donations, loans, and new acquisitions. Important private collections of Brazilian art later came to the museum on long-term arrangement, helping fill the galleries again. Today, the collection covers modern and contemporary work, with a strong focus on Brazilian artists. When you walk the rooms, you are seeing a collection shaped by recovery as much as by ambition.

MAM Rio was never only a quiet place to hang paintings. In the 1950s and 1960s, it became a meeting point for experimental artists. The Neo-Concrete movement grew in this city, with artists like Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. They wanted art that people could touch, wear, and move with. The museum also ran an art school, and classes here helped train a generation of Brazilian artists.

One well-known story comes from an exhibition in 1965. Hélio Oiticica brought his Parangolés — capes and banners made of fabric, meant to be worn while dancing. He came with samba dancers from the Mangueira community, one of Rio's famous samba schools. According to accounts of the evening, the dancers were not allowed inside. So the performance moved out here, onto the grounds. Art, music, and the street met right outside these walls.

The museum also has a long connection with film. It is home to a cinematheque, an archive and screening programme dedicated to cinema. Over the years, it has shown classic, international, and Brazilian films to audiences in Rio. If you see posters for screenings, it is worth checking the programme. Watching a film inside this building adds another layer to a visit — architecture, landscape, and moving images all in one place.

Before you leave, stand once more in the shade beneath the concrete. Feel the breeze move through the open space. Look at the faint wood marks in the walls, the bright lawns, the flat silver water beyond. Planes from the nearby city airport may pass low overhead. Families, joggers, and cyclists move through the park around you. This building was designed to share its ground with all of them... and it still does.