13 Extraordinary Museum Buildings Worth the Trip

A museum building has a strange job. It has to hold the art without competing with it, pull people in from the street, survive a few decades of changing taste, and ideally give a city something it did not have before. Most of them settle for two out of four. The thirteen here manage more than that, and several have become the reason people visit the city at all.

We first ran a version of this list when most of these buildings had just opened. More than a decade on, the interesting question is not which ones looked good on opening day but which ones have held up. So here they are in the order they opened, with what has happened to them since, and three more recent additions that have earned a place.

A plain glass cube on the bank of the Talvera, connected to the old town by two bridges built specifically for it. The trick is in the end walls, which are glazed and slightly reflective by day and turn into projection screens after dark, so the building broadcasts what is inside to anyone walking past. A contemporary art museum in a conservative alpine city, making its case every night.

Tham and Videgård added a perforated orange box to a brick electricity plant from 1901, and refused to make the new part apologise for itself. The colour is the whole argument: rather than matching the brick, it sets up a conversation with it. Seventeen years later the pairing still looks deliberate rather than dated, which is the hardest thing for a bright colour to do.

Built for the thousandth anniversary of the city, this is an inverted pyramid: each floor cantilevers out beyond the one below, so the building gets wider as it rises and shades its own walls in a climate where shade is the point. Visitors spiral down from the top through a central void.

Jeongok Prehistory Museum, South Korea (2011)

X-TU designed this one as a single mirror-polished stainless steel form, more than a hundred metres long, poured into a hillside scattered with Paleolithic hand axes. The skin reflects the landscape around it, so the building reads as a tear in the hillside rather than an object on it. It remains one of the best answers anyone has given to the problem of building next to something a million years old.

Opened in January 2011, the building is wrapped in vertical red steel ribbons that twist as they rise, filtering the light the way sun filters through the old beech forests of Shirakami-Sanchi. Inside are four of the enormous illuminated Nebuta floats from the most recent festival, replaced every year, so the exhibition is never the same twice.

Karuizawa Museum Complex, Nagano, Japan (2011)

In the resort town of Karuizawa, a dark metal roofline folded into sharp creases, with warm timber and angled skylights inside pulling the surrounding forest into the galleries. It is the quietest building on this list and the one most dependent on its site, which is exactly why it works.

MuséoParc Alésia, France (2012)

Bernard Tschumi built a circular interpretation centre on the plain where Julius Caesar besieged Vercingetorix in 52 BC. The timber lattice wrapping the drum is a direct reference to the Roman siege works that once ringed this landscape, and the roof is planted, so from the hillside above the building reads as a ring cut into the fields.

POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw (2013)

Rainer Mahlamäki and Ilmari Lahdelma won the competition in 2005, and the building opened on 19 April 2013, the seventieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The core exhibition followed in October 2014. From outside it is a calm glass box with the word Polin silk-screened in Latin and Hebrew letters. Inside, a curving chasm tears through the entrance hall, standing for the rupture in a thousand years of history.

MuCEM, Marseille, France (2013)

Rudy Ricciotti, working with Roland Carta, wrapped a cube at the harbour mouth in a lattice shell of fibre-reinforced concrete that reads as lace from a distance and as structure up close. Inaugurated on 7 June 2013, it is joined to the seventeenth-century Fort Saint-Jean by a footbridge 130 metres long, which turned a military ruin into a public terrace. The museum gave Marseille a new front door.

Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa (2017)

The best new entry on this list. Heatherwick Studio took a disused grain silo built between 1921 and 1924, a 57 metre tower of 42 packed concrete tubes, and cut galleries out of the middle of it. The atrium was carved from the tubes themselves, leaving curved concrete walls like a cathedral hollowed from a single block, with the remaining shafts capped in glass to drop daylight through. It opened on 22 September 2017 as the largest museum of contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora.

Amos Rex, Helsinki, Finland (2018)

JKMM Architects put the galleries underneath a public square and let the ceilings bulge up through it, so the roof of the museum is a set of domes that children ride bicycles over. Opened on 30 August 2018, it solved two problems at once: a landmark 1930s building kept its facade, and the square got a reason to exist.

Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2021)

MVRDV built a mirrored bowl in the Museumpark and put the entire collection inside it, all 151,000 works, and then let the public in. Most museums show around a fifth of what they own. This one opened on 6 November 2021 with everything on the premises visible, across seven levels and five climate zones, around a 35 metre atrium crossed by staircases. There is a birch and pine forest on the roof.

Cais das Artes, Vitória, Brazil (still unbuilt)

Paulo Mendes da Rocha and Metro Arquitetos designed this waterfront arts complex as two raw concrete volumes cantilevered over the water. It appeared on the original version of this list as a building under construction. Work began in 2010, stopped in 2015, and has never restarted for long: the contractor went bankrupt, the structure sat open to the weather, and a fresh completion date was set for January 2026. Mendes da Rocha died in 2021 without seeing it finished. It is the most quietly devastating entry here, a great building that exists as a concrete frame on a harbour and a set of drawings.

What the good ones have in common

Reading the list back, the buildings that have aged best are not the most dramatic. They are the ones that gave something away. Amos Rex handed the city a square. MuCEM handed it a fort and a bridge. The Rotterdam depot handed over the storage rooms, which every other museum keeps locked. Zeitz MOCAA kept the silo instead of clearing the site. The showpieces that only perform for a camera are not the ones people keep going back to.

For more of this, see our guide to the most extraordinary buildings in the world and our architecture collection.

Image credits: photographs by TH.Korr, Åsa Lundén, Daaé, 663highland, FrDr, Kamil Kulawik, Sino Yu, acediscovery and other Wikimedia Commons contributors, used under CC BY 2.5, CC BY 4.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 and CC BY-SA 4.0, or in the public domain. Three of the buildings above have no freely licensed photograph available, so we have described them instead.

By Moss & Fog Staff