The construction of a new headquarters for the fifty-year-old Museum of Image and Sound of Rio de Janeiro (MIS) at Copacabana district is part of the reshaping of the city of Rio that seeks to improve its tourism and cosmopolitan bias. The project is an initiative of the State Government of Rio de Janeiro through the Secretary of State for Culture in partnership with the Roberto Marinho Foundation. The architectural project signed by the American office Diller Scofidio occupies a total area of 7,000 square meters, at Avenida Atlântica 3432, a well-known address of the city, formerly occupied by the Help disco. The building was designed to become an architectural icon for the city as Rio was presented in a competitive global system. The main purpose of the thesis is to demonstrate that the New Museum has a double purpose. Being the place of custody of an important collection of Carioca culture, it aims to consolidate aesthetic values and lifestyles considered to be typical of Rio, which are often treated as metonym of the nation. However, the MIS activates the Carioca identity as an act that deals with the displacement from the Rio-national to the Rio-local. At the same time, the set of ideas around the new headquarters of the MIS is often expressed through the notion of resistance, a term that highlights a somehow lost hegemonic Carioca identity within the national culture. Resistance is a key concept in this process, which allows the move of political and discursive disputes into the cultural realm. Disputes lived as power struggles intensified since the transfer of the capital to Brasília, surrounded by debates about the political, cultural and economical relevance of Rio in national scenario. It is fundamentally in the field of the culture that this process will develop, merging the potential imaginary of Rio and the Carioca culture as resistance with a set of values and impositions that insists in denying the legitimacy and the cultural (and political) value of the city and its culture.