The Most Beautiful Buildings in North America

43 places in 4 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Space Needle

   United States · 3.4 km from Seattle47.620° N 122.349° W

   

   The tower was built to withstand winds of 200 mph and very strong earthquakes, and it rode out the 2001 Nisqually earthquake. The saucer at the top held revolving restaurants for decades. A renovation completed in 2018 replaced the observation windows with floor-to-ceiling glass, closer to the original 1962 sketches, and created the Loupe, an indoor deck with a revolving glass floor that looks straight down the structure.

   Did you know? The saucer's revolving restaurant was balanced so finely that a single small electric motor of under one kilowatt could turn it.

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2. 02 Walt Disney Concert Hall

   United States · 1.8 km from Los Angeles34.055° N 118.250° W

   

   The project began in 1987 with a gift of 50 million dollars from Lillian Disney, Walt Disney's widow, as a tribute to her husband's love of the arts and of Los Angeles. Gehry finished the design in 1991, but fundraising stalled and the hall rose only after construction resumed in 1999. Cost-cutting replaced the stone skin Gehry had first intended with metal – he later said that stone would have glowed at night.

   Did you know? Sunlight concentrated by the concave, polished Founders Room panels created hot spots on nearby pavements reported at up to about 60 °C.

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3. 03 Flatiron Building

   United States · 2.2 km from New York City40.741° N 73.990° W

   

   The design is a skyscraper dressed as a Renaissance palazzo. The façade is divided like a classical column — a heavier base of limestone for the first three floors, a long shaft, and an ornate crown — and above the base the walls are clad in richly ornamented glazed terracotta. Behind it all stands a steel frame from the American Bridge Company, the technology that allowed such height on such a sliver.

   Did you know? The gusts swirling round the prow lifted skirts and scattered papers; according to a popular story, policemen moving on onlookers gave rise to the phrase 23 skidoo.

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4. 04 Metropolitan Museum of Art

   United States · 7 km from New York City40.779° N 73.963° W

   

   The building is itself a history of American taste. The first structure, a red-brick Gothic Revival hall of 1880 by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, is now swallowed inside more than twenty later additions.

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5. 05 Museum of Modern Art

   United States · 4.7 km from New York City40.762° N 73.978° W

   

   Much of the modern-art canon is on the fifth floor. Van Gogh's The Starry Night, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Matisse's Dance and The Red Studio, Dalí's small The Persistence of Memory, Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie, Frida Kahlo's Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair and Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans are all in the collection, which holds about 200,000 works. Monet's Water Lilies was bought after a fire in 1958 destroyed an earlier one.

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6. 06 Monticello

   United States · 3 km from Charlottesville38.010° N 78.452° W

   

   Work on the first version began in 1768. After years in Paris as American minister to France, Jefferson came home with new ideas drawn from classical buildings and fashionable French houses, and from 1794 he remodelled the house in a Neoclassical manner rooted in the work of Andrea Palladio.

   Did you know? For all its grandeur, the house has only about 1,000 square metres of living space, and the dining table was set up only at mealtimes.

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7. 07 Montreal Biosphère

   Canada · 4.4 km from Montreal45.514° N 73.531° W

   

   It began life as the United States pavilion at the 1967 world's fair, which ran from April to October that year. Visitors rode an escalator reported to be the longest unsupported one in the world up to platforms where real spacecraft, including the Freedom 7 and Gemini 7 capsules, hung from the frame for an exhibition on the space programme, while other floors displayed American folk art, Hollywood memorabilia and large contemporary paintings.

   Did you know? The pavilion drew about 5.3 million visitors during the six months of Expo 67.

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8. 08 CN Tower

   Canada · 2.4 km from Toronto43.643° N 79.387° W

   

   Construction started on 6 February 1973. The hexagonal core was cast with a slipform that jacked itself upward as the concrete set, and by early 1974 the tower was already the tallest structure in Canada.

   Did you know? The record stair climb, set in 1989 by a police officer, reached the main level in 7 minutes 52 seconds; most climbers take about half an hour.

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9. 09 Empire State Building

   United States · 3.1 km from New York City40.748° N 73.986° W

   

   Its Art Deco design is disciplined rather than showy. The zoning rules of 1916 required setbacks so that light could reach the street, and the architects turned that constraint into the building's silhouette: a five-storey base that fills the lot, a deep setback above it, then a tall shaft that steps in at intervals toward the mast.

   Did you know? The project was led by former New York governor Al Smith, backed by financier John J. Raskob and members of the du Pont family.

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10. 10 Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

    United States · 3.1 km from New Haven41.312° N 72.927° W

    

    The building's proportions follow a simple 1:2:3 ratio of height to width to length. At its heart rises a six-storey glass tower of books holding some 180,000 volumes, enclosed in glass like a jewel case; far larger stacks run underground and hold more than a million volumes.

    Did you know? If fire is detected, the glass book tower can be flooded with fire-suppressing gas; an older carbon dioxide system was removed because it endangered staff.

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11. 11 National Gallery of Art

    United States · 1.3 km from Washington38.891° N 77.020° W

    

    The campus has three parts, and each is a destination. The West Building by John Russell Pope, a neoclassical marble temple completed in 1941, holds European and American art from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. Its core is the Mellon purchases themselves, including the Alba Madonna and the van Eyck Annunciation, surrounded by the Kress, Widener and Chester Dale gifts of Italian, Dutch and French painting. I. M.

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12. 12 Woolworth Building

    United States · 1.5 km from New York City40.712° N 74.008° W

    

    The tower was the idea of Frank W. Woolworth, whose chain of five-and-ten-cent stores paid for it as a corporate headquarters. The architect was Cass Gilbert, and the steel frame was engineered by Gunvald Aus and Kort Berle. The first scheme was for a modest office block of a dozen or so floors; Woolworth kept pushing it higher, even sending surveyors to measure the Metropolitan Life Tower so that his own could beat it.

    Did you know? Woolworth's own office on the 24th floor, lined with green marble in the French Empire style and furnished with a bust of Napoleon, survives in its original state.

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13. 13 Hospicio Cabañas

    Mexico · 0.8 km from Guadalajara20.677° N 103.337° W

    

    Tolsá kept the whole complex on a single level so that the old, the sick and children could move about easily. The result is a rectangle of roughly 164 by 145 metres, laid out around twenty-three courtyards of different sizes, with arcades, gardens and the domed chapel at the centre. The building kept its charitable role until 1980, when it became the Instituto Cultural Cabañas, with exhibition halls and schools of arts and crafts.

    Did you know? The dome rests on two rings of sixteen columns, Ionic inside and Doric outside, and its lantern was once crowned by a statue of Charity.

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14. 14 Cathedral of Learning

    United States · 4.4 km from Pittsburgh40.444° N 79.953° W

    

    The idea came from John Gabbert Bowman, who became the university's chancellor in 1921 and found it housed partly in temporary wooden huts left over from the First World War. He wanted one tall building that would give the city a symbol of education and solve the university's lack of space at once.

    Did you know? The wrought ironwork of the Commons Room, including the great gates to the elevators, was designed by the renowned metalworker Samuel Yellin.

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15. 15 Biltmore Estate

    United States · 6.8 km from Asheville35.540° N 82.552° W

    

    The architect was Richard Morris Hunt, and he drew openly on the Loire, taking cues from the châteaux of Blois, Chambord and Chenonceau, with a nod to Waddesdon Manor in England. The result is the grandest American example of the Châteauesque style, a skyline of steep roofs, towers and carved stone.

    Did you know? The basement holds a 70,000-gallon heated indoor swimming pool with underwater lighting, a bowling alley and a gymnasium.

    More about Biltmore Estate →

16. 16 Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City

    Palacio de Bellas Artes

    Mexico · 1.3 km from Mexico City19.435° N 99.141° W

    

    The weight of all that marble on the soft old lakebed beneath the city has had a visible result: the palace has sunk by around four metres since construction began. It is one of the best demonstrations of the ground Mexico City is built on, and part of the building's odd charm.

    Did you know? The first figure to lie in state here was the muralist José Clemente Orozco in 1949, whose own fresco Katharsis hangs inside.

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17. 17 Library of Parliament (Ottawa)

    Library of Parliament

    Canada · 0.8 km from Ottawa45.426° N 75.700° W

    

    It was designed by Thomas Fuller and Chilion Jones, and it borrows its idea from the circular Reading Room of the British Museum while wrapping it in the form of a Gothic chapter house. Construction started in 1859, stalled in 1861, and was only finished in 1876, when some 47,000 volumes were moved in.

    Did you know? The walls were originally banded in grey Gloucester limestone, red Potsdam and buff Ohio sandstones, with purple and green slate stripes.

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18. 18 Chrysler Building

    United States · 3.7 km from New York City40.751° N 73.976° W

    

    The height came with a famous piece of theatre. Van Alen was racing his former partner H. Craig Severance, whose bank tower at 40 Wall Street was going up downtown. Instead of revealing his final height, Van Alen had a 125-foot spire, the "vertex", assembled in secret inside the crown, and on 23 October 1929 it was hoisted out through the top and riveted in place in about an hour and a half, leaving his rival suddenly second.

    Did you know? The steel frame climbed at about four floors a week, yet no worker died during the steelwork.

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19. 19 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

    United States · 7.5 km from New York City40.783° N 73.959° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Inside, the main gallery is a single tall space under a skylight, wrapped by a continuous ramp. The ramp climbs at a gentle 5 percent slope for a total length of about 430 m, widening as it goes up, and it works structurally like a huge arch. Wright wanted visitors to take the lift to the top and walk down, seeing the art in one unbroken sequence and glimpsing people and pictures on other levels across the void.

    Did you know? Wright wanted a marble facade, but to save money the builder sprayed it in gunite concrete; Wright and the builder share credit on a tile on the exterior.

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20. 20 Grand Central Terminal

    United States · 3.8 km from New York City40.753° N 73.977° W

    

    All the platforms lie below ground, and the Beaux-Arts station house above them, planned by Reed and Stem with Whitney Warren of Warren and Wetmore, became the centre of a new business district built over the tracks. On the 42nd Street façade, Jules-Félix Coutan's sculptural group The Glory of Commerce, with Mercury flanked by Hercules and Minerva, spreads 15 metres wide around a great clock.

    Did you know? The faces of the information-booth clock are opalescent glass; the popular story that they are precious opal worth millions is a debunked myth.

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21. 21 Oculus (World Trade Center Transportation Hub)

    World Trade Center

    United States · 1.7 km from New York City40.712° N 74.011° W

    

    Inside, the effect is of standing within the skeleton of an enormous white creature. The ribs rise about 50 metres over a floor of white Italian marble, and along the spine of the roof runs a skylight of roughly 100 metres that can open to the sky. The building is oriented to catch the light: every 11 September the skylight is opened for 102 minutes, the time between the first plane striking the North Tower and the collapse of the second tower.

    Did you know? The shopping centre in its galleries opened on 16 August 2016, with about 365,000 square feet of retail space.

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22. 22 Vizcaya Museum and Gardens

    United States · 5.3 km from Miami25.744° N 80.210° W

    

    Deering began building in 1912 and moved in on Christmas Day 1916, arriving on his yacht. The house took shape between 1914 and 1922 under a team led by the designer Paul Chalfin, with F. Burrall Hoffman as architect and Diego Suarez, a Colombian who had trained at Villa La Pietra in Florence, as landscape designer.

    Did you know? Deering meant the name partly to honour an early Spanish explorer he believed was called Vizcaya; the navigator he had in mind was in fact Sebastián Vizcaíno.

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23. 23 Thomas Jefferson Building

    United States · 1.5 km from Washington38.889° N 77.006° W

    

    More than fifty American painters and sculptors worked on the decoration, and the result is overwhelming in the best sense. The Great Hall is a space of marble, gilding and painted vaults; a brass compass is set into its floor, ringed by the signs of the zodiac. At the head of the stairs outside the reading room, Elihu Vedder's mosaic shows Minerva laying aside her helmet and shield, a goddess of war turned patron of learning.

    Did you know? Jefferson offered to sell his personal library to Congress in September 1814, just one month after the Capitol and its books were burned.

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24. 24 Robie House

    United States · 7.2 km from Chicago41.790° N 87.596° W

    

    Robie wanted plenty of natural light, uninterrupted living space and a view out without passers-by looking in — and, by his own later account, he was told by builders that what he wanted was "one of those damn Wright houses". Wright answered with two long, offset rectangles.

    Did you know? The roofs are cantilevered out from the core of the house, and the outer walls carry no load; they are effectively curtain walls.

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25. 25 Fallingwater

    United States39.906° N 79.468° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Kaufmanns expected a house with a view of the falls. Wright instead put the house on top of them. Concrete terraces cantilever out from a central core of locally quarried stone, with nothing supporting their outer ends, so the house seems to float above the water. Horizontal bands of concrete contrast with vertical stone piers and ribbons of glass.

    Did you know? The house cost about $155,000, roughly four times the $20,000 to $30,000 that Kaufmann had originally expected to spend.

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26. 26 Luis Barragán House and Studio

    Mexico · 7.3 km from Mexico City19.411° N 99.192° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Barragán moved in in 1948 and lived here until his death in 1988, altering the building constantly, so that it served as a laboratory for his ideas. The route through it is a deliberate sequence.

    Did you know? His dressing room is known as the room of the Christ, after the crucifix that hangs there, and the bedrooms have an almost monastic austerity.

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27. 27 Chicago Cultural Center

    United States · 4.1 km from Chicago41.884° N 87.625° W

    

    Inside, the building turns into a jewel box. The grand staircase is of white Carrara marble set with medallions of green Connemara marble from Ireland, and walls and arches glitter with mosaics of iridescent Favrile glass, stone and mother-of-pearl.

    Did you know? The staircase leading to the fifth floor was inspired by the Bridge of Sighs in Venice.

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28. 28 George Peabody Library

    United States · 1.8 km from Baltimore39.297° N 76.615° W

    

    The money came from George Peabody, a merchant and banker who became one of the great American philanthropists of his century. In February 1857 he gave $300,000 as the founding sum for an arts and culture institute for the people of Baltimore, one that joined a music conservatory — the first in the country — to a free reference library. The library wing was designed by the architect Edmund G.

    Did you know? Assistant Philip Reese Uhler extended that method to science, asking experts in each field what to buy, an approach later standard in academic libraries.

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29. 29 Central Library of UNAM, Mexico City

    Biblioteca Central

    Mexico · 13.5 km from Mexico City19.333° N 99.187° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Each façade tells a different part of the story. The north wall is given to the pre-Hispanic world, with Quetzalcóatl, Tláloc and the duality of life and death; the south wall to the colonial era, where the Ptolemaic and Copernican images of the cosmos appear side by side; the east wall to modern Mexico from the Revolution onwards; and the west wall to the university itself and its place in national culture.

    Did you know? The mural is built from stone tiles in about a dozen natural colours, which blend into further hues when seen from a distance.

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30. 30 Cincinnati Union Terminal

    United States · 3.8 km from Covington39.110° N 84.538° W

    

    The terminal was built between 1928 and 1933 to bring the city's scattered railway companies under one roof. The New York firm of Fellheimer & Wagner designed it, and the French-born architect Paul Philippe Cret, brought in as a consultant, steered the decoration firmly towards Art Deco. 5 million.

    Did you know? The great arch of the facade was inspired by Helsinki Central Station, which the architect Alfred Fellheimer visited in 1927.

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