São Paulo Museum of Art

Lina Bo Bardi's 1968 museum on Avenida Paulista lifts its galleries on two enormous prestressed concrete beams resting on piers painted bright red, leaving the plaza underneath open to the city. That covered public space is as much the design as the box above it. Upstairs, her glass easels, replaced by partition walls in 1996 and brought back in 2015, hold the collection in rows across one open second-floor room, so the paintings seem to float and you can walk among them in any order. The labels sit on the back, so you meet each work before you read about it. The European collection is counted among the finest in Latin America, so this is a museum where building and art pull equally.