Earth Sciences Museum

Avenida Pasteur in Urca is usually quiet, but this palace front was built to make an impression. It rises up with stone eagles, guardian lions, and heavy classical columns. If it looks like a government monument designed to outlast everyone who built it, that is partly an accident of timing.

In 1881, Emperor Dom Pedro the Second laid the cornerstone here for a new medical school. The foundation went in, the walls began to rise, and then the money ran out. For more than two decades, the building sat unfinished at the base of the mountain, open to the weather and slowly gathering weeds.

Its rescue arrived in 1908, when Rio hosted a massive National Exposition to celebrate a century of opening Brazilian ports to international trade. The government needed grand pavilions to show off each state of the federation. Architect Francisco Isidoro Monteiro took the abandoned medical school and redesigned it as the Palácio dos Estados, crowning it with classical statuary and imperial grandeur.

Most exposition architecture was temporary, designed out of plaster and wood to be pulled down once the fair closed. But this building was solid masonry. Instead of tearing it down in 1909, the federal government handed the keys to its newly formed geological service. The grand hall meant to display regional pride became the permanent headquarters for mapping Brazil's rocks.