O resgate da unidade perdida: o teatro do museu de Arte Moderna de Affonso Eduardo Reidy. Rio de Janeiro 2007

The Museum of Modern Art designed by Affonso Eduardo Reidy (1909-1964) is an icon of modern architecture in Rio de Janeiro. It was built on a site offered by the Municipal Government in the "Aterro de Flamengo" park, and was partially inaugurated, with the School Building, in 1958, during the presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek. In 1968, the museum main building, where the exhibition hall is, was finished; however, the theater building was left unfinished, and as it was the major volume, it established a link with the city, as it was located in front of Beira Mar Avenue. In 1978, occurred a great fire that destroyed almost all the collection of an itinerant exhibition of the Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres Garcia. The museum opened again in 1982 and the renovation was not totally well done, what motivated that, in 1999, another renovation work had to be done in order to recuperate the original design. In 2002, an opportunity aroused to turn the construction of the museum theater viable, as it was proposed in the original design, through negotiations between the municipal authorities of Rio de Janeiro and the museum direction. In 2007, the theater was opened to the public and its construction respected the volume defined by Reidy in its original design. In this essay it will be presented how the process of ‘rearchitecture’ happened in the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro. From the point of view of its cultural meaning, it is worth mentioning the shows that the theater shelters. In what it concerns to its architecture, it will be analyzed the interior design of the theater, verifying if the ‘spirit’ of the actual building corresponds to the quality of the original design proposed by Reidy. Along the last fifty years, this museum was always perceived by the carioca society without the theater volume. The new articulation of forms establishes a social and architectonic perception different from the one which the inhabitants of the city were accustomed to, that has to age in order to substitute the precedent image. It will also be analyzed how the system of priorities and intensities in the use of the ensemble have changed, specially with the organization of shows – like the Rio Show – celebrations and parties that introduced architectonic elements of precarious esthetic and constructive qualities, disconnected of the original design. This dynamic of successive transformations of the building, in search of rescuing its definite form and function, proposed in Reidy´s design, confirms the validity of an image elaborated in the past that reaches its concretization in the present, and recuperates the unity for a long time unconcluded.