São Paulo Museum of Art

In the middle of Paulista Avenue, São Paulo's busiest thoroughfare, a long red-and-glass box hangs in the air. The architect Lina Bo Bardi lifted the whole museum off the ground on four bright red concrete pillars, clearing a 74-metre span so the plaza underneath stays open to the street, used for protests and markets ever since it opened in 1968.

The museum was the idea of Assis Chateaubriand, a press baron, and Pietro Maria Bardi, an Italian dealer married to the architect. From 1947 they assembled the finest collection of European art in Latin America, from Raphael and Bosch to Van Gogh and Renoir.

Bo Bardi hung those paintings in a way no one had tried. Each canvas floats on a sheet of glass set into a concrete block, so you meet the picture in open space with nothing on the wall behind it, and can walk around to read the back. The easels were taken down in 1996 and, after years in storage, put back in 2015, and the crowd of floating pictures is once again the first thing you see.