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New York-based architectural firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro has won a competition to design the Museum of Image and Sound (MIS) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

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Inspired by the Roberto Burle Marx-designed coastline, wraparound building wall, mountains, and distinctive beach promenade of Copacabana Beach, the building is conceived as an extension of that boulevard, stretched vertically into the museum. The promenade captures the key element of the beach - a space for the public in motion - on foot, bicycle and automobile.

The ‘Vertical Boulevard’ gently traverses indoor and outdoor spaces and branches to make galleries, education programs, spaces of public leisure and entertainment. The building inherits the DNA of Burle Marx but reorients his public surface upward into a thickened façade for the new museum. Housing galleries, education rooms, an auditorium, a cafe, bars and restaurant, and an outdoor cinema on the roof, the vertical circulation sequence connects the street with the building’s entertainment programs, from the clerestory view into the auditorium at street level, to the elevated terrace bar and café, the piano bar at the third level, the restaurant at the sixth level, and outdoor cinema at the roof.

The building is also conceived as an instrument to observe the city in a new way. The panoramic view before it, overexposed to tourists in the hotels and restaurants of Copacabana Beach while restricted for many residents, is perhaps the central image at stake. Through framing strategies, the skin of the MIS curates this view for the visitor moving through the gallery sequence.

Construction is slated to complete in 2011.