Today is Museum Day, a chance to celebrate all your favourite artistic and cultural institutions, big and small. Architecturally, we don’t think it gets much better than Brazilian Modernist Oscar Niemeyer’s flying saucer-shaped contemporary art museum for the city of Niterói, built on a cliffside overlooking Guanabara bay in 1996, and replete with panoramic views of Rio De Janeiro. Designed to appear as if it has sprung organically from the bay’s rocks and blossomed like a flower, it is typical of Niemeyer’s majestic, spiral-favouring style which earned him the title “king of the curve”.
