Niterói Contemporary Art Museum

Niemeyer was in his mid-eighties, and the Sattamini collection of some 1,200 contemporary Brazilian works had nowhere to go, when the city of Niterói commissioned him in 1991 to design a museum on a promontory overlooking Guanabara Bay, facing Rio de Janeiro and Sugarloaf Mountain across the water. His solution, engineered by Bruno Contarini, was a single tapering concrete stem widening into a fifty-metre disc, the whole building read from a distance as an inverted flower or, as it is almost universally nicknamed in Niterói, a flying saucer. A reflecting pool wraps the base on every side, and a curved ramp — structurally independent of the museum itself — spirals up from the surrounding plaza to the entrance, so that arrival becomes a slow revolving approach rather than a straight one. It opened in December 1996. Rio de Janeiro state listed it as a heritage site, and it has since appeared in international television and games as visual shorthand for Niemeyer’s late style.