Items24The creator’s order
  1. 1Guggenheim Museum BilbaoGuggenheim Museum BilbaoFrank Gehry's riverside museum is the building that made cities everywhere want a statement museum of their own. Clad in titanium, limestone and glass, its curves shift color with the weather over the Nervión, so walk the riverbank promenade before you go in. Inside, a tall, light-filled atrium…0
  2. 2Kimbell Art MuseumKimbell Art MuseumLouis Kahn's 1972 museum in Fort Worth is the quiet counterweight to every showier building here. Its long cycloid vaults are split by narrow skylights, and wing-shaped pierced aluminum reflectors spread daylight across the concrete, so the paintings sit in a soft silver light that changes through…0
  3. 3Louvre Abu DhabiLouvre Abu DhabiJean Nouvel's museum city sits low beside the water under a single dome 180 meters across, resting on just four piers. Its layered latticework breaks the sun into what Nouvel calls a "rain of light," spots that drift across the plazas and pools as the day moves. Go late in the afternoon, when the…0
  4. 4Solomon R. Guggenheim MuseumSolomon R. Guggenheim MuseumFrank Lloyd Wright's spiral on Fifth Avenue opened in 1959, six months after his death, and it is still the most famous argument about whether a building should compete with the art. Take the elevator up and walk down the continuous ramp toward the glass dome; the rotunda is the show. It is…0
  5. 5Chichu Art MuseumChichu Art MuseumTadao Ando built this Naoshima museum mostly underground in 2004 so it would not interrupt the Seto Inland Sea landscape, then let daylight pour down into concrete courts open to the sky. The result is a sequence of rooms where light itself does most of the work. Here the building and the art were…0
  6. 6Teshima Art MuseumTeshima Art MuseumA low concrete shell with no columns, shaped like a water droplet at the moment it lands, set at the corner of restored rice terraces on Teshima. Architect Ryue Nishizawa and artist Rei Naito made it as one work, and two oval openings let wind, sound and light straight in. There is no collection…0
  7. 7São Paulo Museum of ArtSão Paulo Museum of ArtLina Bo Bardi's 1968 museum on Avenida Paulista lifts its galleries on two enormous prestressed concrete beams resting on piers painted bright red, leaving the plaza underneath open to the city. That covered public space is as much the design as the box above it. Upstairs, her glass easels,…0
  8. 8Niterói Contemporary Art MuseumNiterói Contemporary Art MuseumOscar Niemeyer's 1996 saucer perches on a cliff across Guanabara Bay from Rio, rising from a shallow reflecting pool and reached by a swirling red ramp 98 meters long. The ramp is the best part: it slowly turns you toward Sugarloaf Mountain and the city. Be clear about the collection: the…0
  9. 9Louisiana Museum of Modern ArtLouisiana Museum of Modern ArtNorth of Copenhagen on the Øresund shore, Louisiana grew from an old villa into a chain of low pavilions linked by glass corridors that wander through the park, so you are always half outside. Architects Jørgen Bo and Vilhelm Wohlert designed the 1958 museum and every extension after it, which is…0
  10. 10Jewish Museum BerlinJewish Museum BerlinDaniel Libeskind's zigzag of titanium-zinc in Berlin is the most emotionally direct building here. Nearly 350,000 people toured it while it stood empty before the 2001 opening, and that tells you something: the architecture carries meaning on its own. Underground axes lead to the Garden of Exile…0