His plan included architectural interventions on every floor, subtle manipulations of material and details consistent with the artist's career-long fascination with how we experience objects in space.
Its textile mills, public buildings and workers' housing are built in a harmonious style of high architectural standards and the urban plan survives intact, giving a vivid impression of Victorian philanthropic paternalism.
Among the most striking of the architectural drawings on display is the study for the plan of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini (1559-60), a sheet in which one can read the layers of overdrawing and erasure through which Michelangelo refined his design, transforming the sheet into a palimpsest of rejected ideas.