MASP — the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand — is the most important art museum in Latin America and the building is as famous as the collection. Lina Bo Bardi designed it in 1968: a 74-metre concrete span suspended between two pairs of red pillars, with the second floor of galleries floating above a public plaza. The plaza below is one of the city's main outdoor meeting spots, used for political demonstrations, antique fairs on Sundays, and the photographs of the Sunday cyclists who fill Paulista when it is closed to cars.
The collection runs from Raphael and Bosch through Goya, Manet, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Renoir; the holdings of European 19th-century painting are remarkable. The Bo Bardi crystal easels are back in use — paintings appear on transparent stands arranged in open galleries, with their labels on the back — and the experience of moving between them is unlike any other major museum in the world.