Museu de Arte do Rio: sobre dimensão patrimonial e projeto

The Museu de Arte do Rio (Rio Art Museum), which also houses the Escola do Olhar (Look School), is a project by Bernardes+Jacobsen Architecture that opened in March 2013. It reuses three adjoining buildings in Mauá Square, with contrasting functions and configurations: the eclectic building called Palacete Dom João VI, inaugurated in 1916, the former Inspectorate of Ports and Channels of the Ministry of Navy; the modern block designed in the late thirties by Saturnino de Brito for Maritime Police, later converted into Civil Police Hospital; and the covered boarding of the Mariano Procópio Bus Terminal, inaugurated in 1950. The constructions are inserted in just over three decades and can be considered contemporary. The authors defined the old hospital as Escola do Olhar and the eclectic building as a museum for spatial and functional affinities. From this, they sought to give unity to the heterogeneous complex by reducing a floor of the old hospital and joining the two buildings through the large “floating” wavy slab that identifies the work; and the operation of the complex was defined from the flow, taking visitors to the terrace floor for "top-down" visitation. The reflection analyses specific issues of the intervention, highlighting the relationship between the project strategy adopted and the subjective assessment of the buildings performed by them, which relegates the promising boarding shelter to the condition of support coverage and services. To this converges the segregating approach to the intervention, undermining the appropriation of the site by users and the corresponding safety, which were implicit goals of revitalization of that area. In a general way, the study wants to demonstrate the importance of heritage valuation for the intervention, associating to the historic-artistic value the most recent criteria of identity bias, which encompass other levels of historicity.