Didem Doğan

The Museum of Tomorrow: Museu do Amanhã

We are on the seaside of the old town: a long bridge across connects two continents. This is Praça Mauá, the Mauá Square and the building which looks like a metal ship about to sail away to the sea is the Museum of Tomorrow. It bears the signature of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava (the architect of New York's Oculus). While designing the museum, he was inspired by the bromeliad plants in the botanical garden located in the south of the city. 

Walking in the museum, I feel like I am getting inside a spaceship. A globe hanging from the ceiling which looks as far as the sky. The second floor which looks like a mezzanine is the exhibition area. Five main exhibition themes welcome you: the cosmos, the Earth, the Anthropocene, the human world, tomorrow, and us…Many scientific questions, such as what is an ecosystem, what is DNA, what will be the world population in the future, how brain functions, when our resources will be depleted, are answered in a simple, esthetical and entertaining manner. Who are we? Where have we come from? Where are we? Where are we going to? How are we going there? 

We start the tour with the cosmos section: we are made with the same stuff as stars and we are all alike in our dependence on the universe and our roots. The Earth section is devoted to the matter, life, and thought: what is common in all living beings: DNA. The pictures taken during the trips to the Guanabara Bay are used to explain ecosystems. The next section is the Anthropocene, in other words, the world constructed by human beings, which depicts how human beings changed the atmosphere, bio-diversity, and the flow of rivers etc. The section called Tomorrow offers predictions about the future and global trends: the increasing population, hyper inter-dependence, the direction of technology, the limits of science…

There is a metal club stabbed into the floor at the end of the exhibition area: this is Ching which is believed by the Australian Aboriginals to build a bridge between the past and the future. Similarly the museum too aims to be a connecting point between the past and tomorrow. And it has an answer to all the questions it asks to you: “tomorrow is something constructed today.”

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