A customs post for goods arriving by sea — the Dogana da Mar — has existed at the eastern tip of Dorsoduro since at least the fifteenth century, controlling cargo entering Venice from the Adriatic alongside the inland Dogana da Terra. The current triangular building, with its long warehouses converging on a low watchtower, was raised between 1677 and 1682 to a design by Giuseppe Benoni after a public competition. Two bronze figures of Atlas, traditionally attributed to the workshop of Bernardo Falconi, support a gilded copper globe on the tower; on top, a bronze statue of Fortuna cast by Falconi in 1678 turns with the wind, serving as the customs house’s weathervane and a landmark visible across the lagoon. The Dogana continued to operate, with various administrative changes through the fall of the Republic in 1797 and the nineteenth-century Austrian and Italian periods, until its commercial function was wound down in the twentieth century.

After the closure of customs activity the building stood largely disused for decades, used intermittently for exhibitions while a long-term destination was debated. In 2007 the City of Venice awarded a thirty-three-year concession to a foundation linked to French collector François Pinault, who already operated Palazzo Grassi as a contemporary-art venue, on condition that the historic structure be restored and reopened to the public as a museum. The architectural commission went to Tadao Ando, the Japanese architect awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1995, who carried out the intervention between 2007 and 2009. Ando’s approach kept the existing brick walls, wooden roof trusses and triangular plan substantially intact, inserting a freestanding inner volume of smooth poured concrete that defines the new exhibition rooms without obscuring the original masonry.

Punta della Dogana opened to the public on 6 June 2009 with the inaugural exhibition Mapping the Studio, drawn from the Pinault Collection and curated by Alison Gingeras and Francesco Bonami. Since then it has functioned as one of the two Venetian venues of the François Pinault Foundation — together with the nearby Palazzo Grassi at San Samuele — hosting large monographic and thematic shows of contemporary art, usually renewed every one to two years, with a combined ticket between the two sites. Its position at the prow of Dorsoduro, framed by Baldassare Longhena’s basilica of Santa Maria della Salute on one side and the open Bacino di San Marco on the other, has made the converted customs house one of the most prominent stages for international contemporary art in Italy since 2009.