Santos Dumont: the best of ‘Tomorrow’s Museum’

(Rio de Janeiro, brpress) - With stunning architecture that resembles a spaceship, the museum pays a not to be missed homage to the “aviation’s father”.

(Rio de Janeiro, brpress) – The newly opened Museum of Tomorrow, located in Mauá Square, the port area of Rio de Janeiro which was entirely redesigned for the Olympic Games – the Porto Maravilha – and now has been considered the greatest legacy for the ‘Wonderful City’, has set up a different schedule during the Olympic season: it is now opening on Mondays and, in August, the tickets should be purchased online only in by the museum’s website.

“Typically, Mondays are closed for maintenance, but due to the high demand we’ve decided to open every day, from Sunday to Sunday, at the same time, from 10am to 18pm”, announced the director of the Museum of Tomorrow, Ricardo Piquet. This is one of the best cultural tours in Rio during the Games – in double with the Rio Art Museum (MAR), which has a good exhibition about the princess Leopoldina.

On Dumont wings

With stunning architecture that resembles a spaceship, signed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, the museum has various exhibits on display, but the Poet Flying – Santos Dumont, which will be maintained throughout the period of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, is the icing on the cake. Curated by Gringo Cardia, the show has audiovisual language and interactive activities, including two life-size replicas: the pioneer plane 14 Bis and the aircraft Demoiselle, the most complete inventor’s project.

The aim of the exhibition is to highlight Santos Dumont as an intrepid entrepreneur whose way of working reminds concepts still current: the “aviation’s father”, as the Brazilian inventor is called in Brazil, allowed his projects to be replicated instead of registering patents, in a kind of creative commons before even the term exists. Santos Dumont is considered one of the first contemporary designers, with precise strokes, simple and functional, one of the most famous Brazilians who launched fashion in Paris, the capital of the world in the early 20th century.

TV in Brazil

In the pre-Olympic week, the museum will open to the public, a small exhibition on the history of television in Brazil. “This exhibition will culminate with the presentation in the auditorium of a large screen of 8.5 meters wide in 8K resolution, which is 16 times more accurate than the television known today and sold in the market, 4K,” says Piquet.

Due to the passage of the marathon that will take place on two Sundays (female, on 14/08, and the male, on 21/08), the museum hours will be changed, starting at 3PM and ending at 9PM. “That in order to enable all the blocking operations of the museum’s access roads to give priority to the passage of the marathon,” said the director general.

The rates remain the same for tickets purchased over the Internet: R$ 10 and R$ 5 (concessions). In the next two Tuesdays (9 and 16/08), the gratuity will be suspended due to the Olympics, returning in later weeks. It remains, however, the gratuity for visitors over 70 years and for public school students, as well as well asall gratuitous guarantees given by Brazilian law.

Avoiding queues

The online only tickets purchase is meant to avoid the huge queues due to slow ticket sales at the box office with little personnel structure and poor organisation. Another failure of the Museum of Tomorrow is that there are no maps of the exhibits and the lack of audioguides, neither in Portuguese nor in other languages, which harms rather the use and understanding of the attractions. The Museum of Tomorrow certainly deserves more care in these important sectors.