The Museum of Cultures occupies the converted Ansaldo factory at the heart of the Tortona design district, behind a curving zinc facade by the British architect David Chipperfield. The building is the draw as much as the contents: the central Agorà, a hall walled in undulating translucent glass that glows green-white, is one of the finest interior spaces built in Milan this century.
The permanent collection gathers the city's holdings of art and objects from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania — masks, textiles, ritual objects assembled over a century of trade and colonial contact. The real programme, though, is the temporary exhibitions, which run to crowd-pulling retrospectives of artists from Kandinsky to Frida Kahlo. Time a visit to the design fair in April and the whole district around it turns into an open-air installation.