The scene Tuesday afternoon at the TriBeCa offices of the Italian television network RAI International was, perhaps not surprisingly, a little like RAI’s distinctive brand of programming: leisurely, charming, chatty, full of attractive personalities and, for English speakers anyway, slightly baffling. But not necessarily in a bad way. The event was billed as a send-off for “Roy Lichtenstein, Meditations on Art,” an exhibition of more than 100 works by the late Pop artist opening that day at the Triennale museum in Milan. But the 50 or so men and women milling around a red-carpeted 25th-floor meeting room sipping Pellegrino and speaking fluent Italish were there for what proved to be bigger news: the official announcement that the Triennale — the impressive 87-year-old design-focused institution — will open a New York satellite exhibition space, Triennale NYC, this spring.

A live closed-circuit TV hookup with the Triennale in Milan — think giant projection-screen Skype — yielded a series of disconnections, pixelated greetings back and forth across the Atlantic (“saluti a tutti!”) and halting moments of unclear protocol, but the crowd took it all in with breezy bella figura. On the screen, there was the Triennale president Davide Rampello at the museum in Milan, and in the room an array of Italian-culture panjandrums, including the Italian Consul General Francesco Maria Talò, the RAI director Massimo Magliaro and Roberto “Bobo” Manzoni, a veteran Milanese businessman who has been guiding the Triennale’s effort to scope out potential new locations, à la the Guggenheim, around the world. Manzoni said that a visit to MoMA in December 2008 gave him the flash of inspiration that allowed him to “follow a dream”: to open Triennale NYC across West 53rd Street in what was the home of the Museum of Arts and Design (formerly the American Craft Museum) from 1986 until 2008, when it moved to new quarters in the remade 2 Columbus Circle.

Details were few: Work will begin on the space next week, and the design team includes Michele de Lucchi, the Biblically bearded Milanese architect who guided the Triennale through an ambitious renovation and re-adaptation program. (The rather dire Midtown site can only benefit from his elegance and inventiveness.) The 22,378-square-foot, four-level facility — leased for the next 16 years — will devote over half of its total area to exhibitions, beginning with a show celebrating the works of the iconic Italian designer Giò Ponti organized by the Arte Povera champion (and Prada Foundation curator) Germano Celant. Maurizio Marchiori, the founder of the short-lived downtown art and lifestyle magazine Tar Art, will serve as chief operating officer of Artlivingny, an entity created, as its manifesto reads, to handle “the planning, management and promotion of Triennale NYC.” (Manzoni is president of Artlivingny and, for all intents and purposes, the head of Triennale NYC.)

With the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum undergoing an ambitious expansion and the Museum of Arts and Design ensconced in its spiffy new home, Triennale NYC enters New York’s design landscape at a burgeoning — and competitive — moment. But it will have some things going for it that the others don’t: an authentic espresso bar/cafe that will stay open until 2 a.m., a retail level devoted to the twin pleasures of wine and books, and a broader mission to promote what it calls “I’Italianità” — or, as the Consul General put it, to nods of approval from the crowd, “Italian life, a universal culture that we now offer to New York City.”

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