The Niterói Contemporary Art Museum (Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói — MAC) is situated in the city of Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and is one of the city’s main landmarks. It was completed in 1996.
Designed by Oscar Niemeyer with the assistance of structural engineer Bruno Contarini, who had worked with Niemeyer on earlier projects, the MAC-Niterói is 16 meters high; its cupola has a diameter of 50 meters with three floors. The museum projects itself over Boa Viagem (“Bon Voyage,” “Good Journey”), the 817 square metres (8,790 sq ft) reflecting pool that surrounds the cylindrical base “like a flower,” in the words of Niemeyer.
A wide access slope leads to a Hall of Expositions, which has a capacity for sixty people. Two doors lead to the viewing gallery, through which can be seen the Guanabara Bay, Rio de Janeiro, and Sugarloaf Mountain. The saucer-shaped modernist structure, which has been likened to a UFO, is set on a cliffside, at the bottom of which is a beach.
Want to see more Architecture and Design? Follow Pretty Architecture. ;) Text source: Wikipedia
JM Ramírez-Suassi (1970) was born in Majorca (Spain) and now lives and works in Madrid. His photographs, wich at first sight appears to fit seamlessly into the great nowhere, involve many visits to the same landscapes to observe the change year after year. Peripheries is an ongoing series documenting the outskirts of the city Madrid. Nonetheless, recent work (Eden) also emphasizes seemingly casual shots of his family and friends. JM Ramírez-Suassi exhibited his artwork in Europe and USA. He is a self-taught.
South Notes:Always the journey. Always the path. Or likewise, always the gaze. It’s as if the human gaze has been secreting during centuries a substance capable of influencing and of changing the world, a glue which fastens places and things. This substance doesn’t really exist, things don’t forge by means of glue to be converted into a reasonable set. It’s our gaze that fastens them, the one that grants a place in the totality, a gaze that doubts between understanding or not, as if by intuition, by the mere act of gazing them, we wish to grant a place to things in the world. This world, on the other hand, is untidy, giving us no guarantee, in fact, that things can be placed. Fundamentaly, the gaze is the beginning and the end. Almería is one of the unknown regions of Spain. It’s true that other photographers have worked in this region in a splendid way, such as Vanessa Winship. For me the landscapes are dreams, dreams that precipitate rapidly in the experience of emptiness. Within this experience of emptiness is where I try to construct the beauty which has possesed the place. As if I had to find an order where once only existed chaos and confusion.
