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Step out of Groningen's railway station in the northern Netherlands and you meet the museum before you reach the city: a cluster of clashing coloured pavilions set on their own island in the canal, one of them a gold-clad cylinder. This deliberately provocative building opened in 1994, coordinated by the Italian designer Alessandro Mendini with others including Philippe Starck, and it divided local opinion from the day it appeared.
Inside, the collection is calmer and more varied than the shell suggests. There is regional history, a strong group of paintings by De Ploeg, the early-20th-century Groningen expressionists, and Chinese and Japanese porcelain recovered from sunken trading ships.
Old masters and applied arts fill the rest, so a visit moves between the building's swagger and quiet rooms of local painting and ceramics.
