Benaki Museum Pireos.

Pireos 138. The wide industrial avenue running west out of Omonia toward Piraeus, past the old gasworks, into the part of Athens the twenty-first century rewrote first.

This is the contemporary wing of the Benaki Museum — the parent museum is the 1930 collection on Kolonaki, founded by Antonis Benakis. The Pireos building came much later, on the site of a 1950s car dealership and repair shop. Maria Kokkinou and Andreas Kourkoulas — the Athens practice founded in 1987 — were given the site in the late 1990s and asked to make it a museum. They opened in 2004, in time for the Olympics. The Greek Institute of Architects awarded it two years later.

The building reads as deliberate restraint. Brick on the outside, almost windowless toward the street — a treasure chest, in the architects' own phrase. Inside, an 850-square-metre courtyard atrium pulls the building open to the sky; glass-fronted ramps lead the visitor up the three levels around it. Exhibition halls on the perimeter, a 300-seat amphitheatre at the back, a restaurant that opens to the courtyard, the largest contemporary Greek design shop in the city in the corner. Marina Abramović staged AS ONE here in 2016 — six weeks, blindfolded tours, rice counting, eye-to-eye silences.

Open Thursday to Sunday, ten to six. Closed Monday through Wednesday. The exhibition programme rotates — check before you go. Combine with a walk down Pireos toward the Foundation of the Hellenic World, or up to Bios and the bars in Gazi after dark. The museum changed this neighbourhood. The neighbourhood is still changing.