The Most Beautiful Modern Buildings in the World

50 places in 24 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Taipei 101

   Taiwan · 0.4 km from Taipei25.034° N 121.565° E

   

   The single most photographed part of Taipei 101 isn't visible from the street. Between the 87th and 92nd floors hangs a bright yellow steel sphere weighing 660 tonnes — the largest tuned mass damper ever installed in a building, and one of the few designed to be seen rather than hidden. It's suspended on cables like a giant pendulum; when wind or an earthquake pushes the tower one way, the ball's inertia keeps it lagging behind, and hydraulic pistons bleed that relative motion off as heat, cancelling out a meaningful share of the sway before it ever reaches the people inside. After a 2015 typhoon made the ball swing hard enough to be filmed swaying nearly a metre, the building's operators leaned into it rather than downplaying it, giving the damper a cartoon mascot and its own gift shop.

   Did you know? In January 2026 Alex Honnold climbed the outside of the tower without ropes in about an hour and a half, in an authorised free solo.

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2. 02 Petronas Towers

   Malaysia · 3.2 km from Kuala Lumpur3.158° N 101.712° E

   

   From 1998 to 2004 the Petronas Towers were the tallest buildings in the world, and they are still the tallest twin towers anywhere, at 451.9 metres. The Argentine-American architect César Pelli designed them for the Malaysian state oil company. He deliberately drew on Islamic geometry: each tower's floor plan is an eight-pointed star made of two overlapping squares, with rounded lobes fitted into the angles to gain office space. The steel and glass cladding repeats the pattern as it steps up towards the spires. The Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, opened the towers on 31 August 1999.

   Did you know? Climber Alain Robert was stopped at the 60th floor in 1997 and again ten years later, before scaling Tower Two barehanded in 2009.

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3. 03 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

   Spain · 2.1 km from Bilbao43.269° N 2.934° W

   

   Frank Gehry's museum on the Nervión is the building that gave architecture a phrase: the "Bilbao effect", the idea that one daring cultural project can turn round a declining industrial city. In 1991 the Basque Government offered to pay for a Guggenheim museum on the run-down riverside port land, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation agreed to run it. King Juan Carlos I opened it on 18 October 1997. Within its first three years close to four million people came, and the regional council reckoned that tax on their spending more than repaid the construction bill.

   Did you know? The titanium skin is only about 0.4 mm thick, rolled in Pittsburgh, and all 33,000 plates together weigh only about 60 tonnes.

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4. 04 Fernsehturm Berlin

   Berliner Fernsehturm

   Germany · 0.7 km from Berlin52.521° N 13.409° E

   

   The Fernsehturm rises 368 metres from the centre of Berlin, the tallest structure in Germany and visible from almost every district of the city. It was built between 1965 and 1969 by the East German government as both a broadcasting tower and a statement of socialist modernity, and its silhouette deliberately borrowed from the space age: the steel-clad sphere near the top was meant to recall Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. Many architects worked on it, among them Hermann Henselmann, Jörg Streitparth, Fritz Dieter and Günter Franke.

   Did you know? The East German budget for the tower was about 33 million marks, but the final bill came to more than 132 million, four times the plan.

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5. 05 Space Needle

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

   

   The Space Needle was built for the 1962 Seattle World's Fair and finished in under a year: work began in April 1961 and the last elevator car was installed the day before the fair opened in April 1962. Its shape came from a compromise. The fair's chairman Edward Carlson sketched a giant tethered balloon, the architect John Graham proposed a flying saucer for the top, and Victor Steinbrueck contributed the hourglass waist and the three-legged stance. The result, 605 feet (184 m) tall, was for years the tallest structure west of the Mississippi.

   Did you know? Edward Carlson's idea for the tower came after a visit to the Stuttgart TV Tower in Germany, and his first balloon-like sketch was drawn on a napkin.

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6. 06 Oslo Opera House

   Norway · 1.3 km from Oslo59.907° N 10.754° E

   

   The Oslo Opera House rises out of the fjord like a sloping white iceberg, and its roof is a public square. That was the core of Snøhetta's winning design, chosen from some 350 entries after the Norwegian parliament decided in 1999 to build a new national opera house in Bjørvika, a former harbour and industrial area at the head of the Oslofjord. The building was completed in 2007 and opened on 12 April 2008, and it is the largest cultural building constructed in Norway since Nidaros Cathedral around 1300.

   Did you know? The building contains about 1,100 rooms spread over some 49,000 square metres of floor space.

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7. 07 Torre Glòries

   Spain · 2.1 km from Barcelona41.403° N 2.190° E

   

   Before it had the name it carries now, this tower belonged entirely to a water utility. Aigües de Barcelona commissioned it as a new headquarters, and the French architect Jean Nouvel gave the company something that looked less like an office block than a geological event — a rounded, tapering form he described as evoking a geyser bursting up through Barcelona's grid. He borrowed the idea of a shimmering, broken-up surface directly from Antoni Gaudí's ceramic trencadís mosaics elsewhere in the city, and the tower's silhouette was meant to echo the jagged outline of Montserrat, the mountain that dominates views inland from Barcelona.

   Did you know? The tower is built as two concentric concrete cylinders that never touch; the inner core holds the lifts and stairs, the outer shell is pierced by about 4,500 windows.

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8. 08 Teatro Colón

   Argentina · 4.7 km from Buenos Aires34.601° S 58.383° W

   

   The Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires is one of the great opera houses of the world, and for acoustics it has few equals: in a survey of conductors and musicians carried out by the acoustician Leo Beranek it came out as the best hall for opera anywhere and the second best for concerts. The present building opened on 25 May 1908 with Verdi's "Aida", replacing a first Teatro Colón that had opened in 1857 with "La traviata" and closed in 1888. It was declared a national historic monument in 1991.

   Did you know? On 26 June 1910, during a performance of Manon, an anarchist bomb thrown from the upper gallery exploded among the stalls, injuring about ten people.

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9. 09 National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing

   People's Republic of China · 0.9 km from Beijing39.903° N 116.384° E

   

   The National Centre for the Performing Arts rises beside Chang'an Avenue as an enormous shell of titanium and glass floating on a lake. The French architect Paul Andreu, best known for his airport terminals, designed it as a single ellipsoidal dome that holds three separate theatres. Construction began in December 2001 and the centre opened in December 2007, a short walk west of Tiananmen Square and the Great Hall of the People and close to the Forbidden City — a daring piece of futurism set down in the most symbolic corner of the capital.

   Did you know? The dome stands 46.285 metres tall, kept deliberately 3.32 metres lower than the neighbouring Great Hall of the People.

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10. 10 30 St Mary Axe

    United Kingdom · 3 km from London51.514° N 0.080° W

    

    30 St Mary Axe, known to everyone as the Gherkin, gave London its first great piece of twenty-first-century skyline. Designed by Foster + Partners with the engineers Arup and built by Skanska, it was completed in December 2003 and opened in April 2004: 41 storeys and 180 metres of tapering glass in a spiral diagrid of steel. In 2004 it won the Stirling Prize, Britain's most prestigious architecture award.

    Did you know? Builders on the site found the skeleton of a teenage girl from Roman London, about 1,600 years old; she was reburied at the foot of the tower in 2006.

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11. 11 Shanghai Tower

    People's Republic of China · 6.6 km from Shanghai31.235° N 121.501° E

    

    The Shanghai Tower is the tallest building in China and one of the tallest in the world, a 632-metre spiral of glass that completes the trio of supertall towers in Lujiazui, the financial district on the eastern bank of the Huangpu river in Pudong. Its neighbours, the Jin Mao Tower of 1999 and the Shanghai World Financial Center of 2008, were planned together with it as early as 1993, and the three form the world's first cluster of adjacent supertall buildings. Construction started in November 2008, the tower topped out in August 2013 and opened in stages from 2015.

    Did you know? Its tuned mass damper is a pendulum of about 1,000 tonnes that uses eddy currents, generated by magnets moving over copper plates, to resist the sway.

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12. 12 Burj Khalifa

    United Arab Emirates · 2.3 km from Dubai25.197° N 55.274° E

    

    At 829.8 metres to the tip of its spire, the Burj Khalifa has been the tallest building on Earth since it opened in January 2010, taking the title from Taipei 101. It rises out of Downtown Dubai beside Sheikh Zayed Road, and it was conceived less as an office tower than as the anchor of an entire new district: the Dubai Mall, an artificial lake, hotels and residential blocks were all planned around it. Construction started in January 2004 and the exterior was finished in October 2009. During the build it was called Burj Dubai; it was renamed at the opening ceremony after Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the UAE, whose federal government had helped Dubai through the debt crisis that followed 2008.

    Did you know? During Ramadan, residents above the 150th floor break their fast a few minutes later than those at street level, because they see the sun set later.

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13. 13 Jin Mao Tower

    People's Republic of China · 6.7 km from Shanghai31.237° N 121.501° E

    

    The Jin Mao Tower was the first of the supertall buildings that now crowd the Lujiazui peninsula in Pudong, across the Huangpu River from the Bund, and it is still the most graceful of them. Completed in 1999 to a design by Adrian Smith of the Chicago firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, it rises 420.5 metres to the tip of its spire. Its name translates roughly as "Golden Prosperity Building", and the whole design is built around the number eight, associated with prosperity in Chinese culture: 88 floors, divided into sixteen segments, each one-eighth shorter than the sixteen-storey base, with an octagonal concrete core ringed by eight great composite columns and eight steel ones. It was officially dedicated on 28 August 1998, a date chosen for its eights.

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14. 14 Tate Modern

    United Kingdom · 1.5 km from London51.508° N 0.099° W

    

    Tate Modern occupies a power station on the south bank of the Thames, and the building matters as much as the art. Bankside Power Station was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who also designed Battersea Power Station. It was built between 1947 and 1963, stands directly across the river from St Paul's Cathedral, and closed in 1981. It escaped demolition when the Tate chose it in 1994 as the home for its international modern collection. The Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron kept the brick shell and the tall chimney and added a two-storey glass lightbox on the roof. The gallery opened in 2000. The collection displays are free, which helps explain why this is the most visited art gallery in the country.

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15. 15 Van Gogh Museum

    Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.4 km from Amsterdam52.358° N 4.881° E

    

    No other museum holds as much of Vincent van Gogh's work: about 200 paintings, 400 drawings and 700 of his letters. The collection survived because his family kept it. When Vincent died in 1890 his unsold work went to his brother Theo, who died six months later. Theo's widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, then spent decades organising exhibitions, and she did more than anyone to build the painter's reputation. Her son, Vincent Willem, eventually placed the collection in a state-backed foundation, and the museum opened on 2 June 1973 on Amsterdam's Museumplein, between the Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk.

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16. 16 Museum of Modern Art

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

    

    The Museum of Modern Art on West 53rd Street in Manhattan did more than any other institution to shape the idea of modern art, and many of the pictures that define it hang here. Three collectors started it in 1929: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan. It opened in a few rented rooms on Fifth Avenue on 7 November, nine days after the Wall Street Crash. Its first director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., treated photography, film, architecture and design as art alongside painting, and MoMA was the first museum to create departments for photography and film. In 1939 it moved into its own International Style building by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, on land donated by John D. Rockefeller Jr., who had at first opposed the whole idea.

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17. 17 Musée d'Orsay

    France · 2 km from Paris48.860° N 2.327° E

    

    The Musée d'Orsay lives in a railway station, and the building is half the experience. The Gare d'Orsay was built on the Left Bank for the Paris–Orléans railway in time for the 1900 Exposition Universelle, designed by Victor Laloux with Lucien Magne and Émile Bénard. The station later fell out of main-line use and survived by luck: a hotel was planned on the site in the early 1970s before the state listed it and decided to fill it with the art of 1848 to 1914. The architects of ACT Architecture converted it, Gae Aulenti designed the interior, and President Mitterrand opened the museum in December 1986.

    Did you know? Before it became a museum, the empty station served as the main set for Orson Welles's 1962 film The Trial.

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18. 18 Sydney Opera House

    Australia · 1.6 km from Sydney33.857° S 151.215° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Utzon won the 1957 competition with something closer to a gesture than a blueprint — a few sketched curves and a confident hand, no structural drawings, nothing that told engineers how the shapes would actually stand up. That gap between vision and physics turned into years of work: it took Utzon and the engineering firm Arup something like twelve different structural schemes before they landed on the one that actually got built — cutting every roof shell from sections of a single imagined sphere, so the same precast ribs could be reused across different-sized "sails" instead of each one needing its own custom formwork. It's a solution so elegant in retrospect that it's easy to forget how long it took to arrive at, and how close the project came to being unbuildable.

    Did you know? The Concert Hall's Grand Organ, with more than 10,000 pipes, is the largest mechanical tracker-action organ in the world.

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19. 19 CN Tower

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

    

    Toronto's skyline is organised around a single concrete needle. The CN Tower rises 553.3 metres from the old Railway Lands south of Front Street, and for 32 years, from 1975 to 2007, nothing freestanding anywhere on Earth stood taller. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai took that title, and the Canton Tower later overtook it as the world's tallest tower, but the CN Tower is still the tallest freestanding structure in the Western Hemisphere. It was conceived by the Canadian National railway as a television and radio broadcasting platform for the Toronto area, and as a showcase for Canadian engineering; the design came from John Andrews with the firm Webb Zerafa Menkes Housden.

    Did you know? Over its full height the concrete shaft strays from true vertical by just 29 mm, checked during pouring against huge plumb bobs watched through telescopes.

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20. 20 Empire State Building

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

    

    The Empire State Building is the skyscraper against which other tall buildings are still measured, and it earned that status in a single burst of work at the start of the Great Depression. It stands on the west side of Fifth Avenue between 33rd and 34th Streets, on the site of the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Construction began on 17 March 1930 and the building opened on 1 May 1931, a building time of about 410 days for a 102-storey tower. The architects were Shreve, Lamb & Harmon. At 1,250 feet (381 m) to the top floor and 1,454 feet (443 m) with its spire and antenna, it was the tallest building in the world until the North Tower of the World Trade Center overtook it in 1970.

    Did you know? On 28 July 1945 a B-25 bomber flying in thick fog struck the north face between the 78th and 80th floors, killing 14 people.

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21. 21 Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

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

    

    From outside, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library looks like a sealed stone box: a windowless block of pale panels set in a stone grid. The trick is revealed only indoors. The panels are thin slabs of veined Vermont marble, milled to about 1.25 inches, and in daylight they glow a warm amber, lighting the interior like lantern paper while keeping direct sun away from fragile pages. Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed it, and it opened on Yale's Hewitt Quadrangle in October 1963, the gift of Edwin and Frederick W. Beinecke and Johanna Weigle, widow of their brother Walter.

    Did you know? Gordon Bunshaft said the idea for the glowing marble walls came from alabaster he had seen in a bathhouse of Istanbul's Dolmabahçe Palace, which he took for onyx.

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22. 22 Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía

    Palacio de las Artes Reina Sofía

    Spain · 5.1 km from Valencia39.458° N 0.356° W

    

    The Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía looks less like a theatre than a giant white creature resting in a garden of water. Santiago Calatrava designed it as the final great piece of the City of Arts and Sciences, the chain of futuristic buildings laid out along the old bed of the Turia. After a catastrophic flood in 1957 the river was diverted around the city, and its dry channel was turned into a long ribbon of parkland; the opera house stands at the northwestern end of the complex, rising out of shallow pools and walkways.

    Did you know? The main stage is big enough to hold two complete opera sets at once, so two different operas can be performed on consecutive days.

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23. 23 Auditorio de Tenerife

    Spain · 1.5 km from Santa Cruz de Tenerife28.456° N 16.251° W

    

    Santiago Calatrava's Auditorio de Tenerife rises on the waterfront of Santa Cruz like a breaking wave or a sail caught in the wind. The concert hall was planned for decades, moved between several sites and redesigned before Calatrava took over in 1989; construction began in 1997 beside the old Castle of San Juan Bautista and the building was inaugurated on 26 September 2003 by Felipe, then Prince of Asturias, with Penderecki's Fanfarria Real. In 2011 it was renamed after Adán Martín, who had championed it as head of the island government, though almost everyone still calls it simply the Auditorio.

    Did you know? The project took some 33 years from first plans to completion, and the final bill of about 72 million euros was more than double the original budget.

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24. 24 Tokyo Skytree

    Japan · 6.1 km from Tokyo35.710° N 139.811° E

    

    Tokyo Skytree is the tallest tower in the world, a 634 m lattice of steel that Guinness World Records certified in 2011 as the tallest free-standing tower; among all structures, only the Burj Khalifa and Merdeka 118 are taller. It was built by Tobu Railway with a group of six broadcasters led by NHK, because the older Tokyo Tower, hemmed in by high-rises, could no longer send digital television signals across the whole Kanto region. The architects were Nikken Sekkei and the main contractor Obayashi. Construction started in July 2008, the tower reached full height on 18 March 2011, a week after the Tohoku earthquake, and it opened to the public on 22 May 2012. The height was chosen as a pun: read in Japanese, the digits 6, 3 and 4 spell Musashi, the old name of the province around Tokyo.

    Did you know? The name Tokyo Skytree was picked by a nationwide public vote in 2008, winning about 30 percent of roughly 110,000 ballots cast.

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25. 25 Canton Tower

    People's Republic of China · 6.1 km from Guangzhou23.109° N 113.319° E

    

    Canton Tower rises 600 m above Guangzhou, a slender lattice of steel twisted like a wrung-out rope. Its form comes from two ellipses, one at ground level and one at 450 m, rotated against each other; the twist squeezes the structure into a narrow "waist" halfway up, where the lattice becomes dense, and lets it open out again towards the top. Locals nicknamed it the "slim waist". It was designed by the Dutch architects Mark Hemel and Barbara Kuit of Information Based Architecture with the engineers of Arup, who won the international competition in 2004, and it opened in 2010 in time for the Asian Games. The hyperboloid principle goes back to the Russian engineer Vladimir Shukhov, who patented it in 1899.

    Did you know? From its topping-out in August 2009 until Tokyo Skytree overtook it in 2011, it was the tallest tower in the world.

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26. 26 Milano Centrale

    Stazione di Milano Centrale

    Italy · 1.5 km from Milan45.486° N 9.204° E

    

    Milano Centrale is less a railway station than a monument to arrival. Its main front, facing Piazza Duca d'Aosta, stretches about 200 metres wide and some 50 metres high, a massive stone wall of arches, columns, reliefs and sculpture that reads more like a palace or a temple than a place to catch a train. The architect Ulisse Stacchini won the design competition in 1912 with a project titled "In Motu Vita", life in motion. The First World War and the economic crisis that followed stalled the work, and building resumed in earnest only in 1925; the station opened on 1 July 1931.

    Did you know? Its cornerstone was laid by King Victor Emmanuel III in 1906, years before any design for the building had actually been chosen.

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27. 27 National Gallery of Art

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

    

    The National Gallery of Art on the National Mall was a gift from one man that snowballed into a national collection. Andrew W. Mellon, banker and Treasury Secretary, began collecting old masters during the First World War; in 1930–31 his trust bought 21 paintings from the Hermitage during the Soviet sales, including Raphael's Alba Madonna, Titian's Venus with a Mirror and Jan van Eyck's Annunciation. In 1937 Congress accepted his collection and the money for a building, and the gallery opened in 1941. Unlike its neighbours on the Mall it is not part of the Smithsonian.

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28. 28 Anne Frank House

    Kingdom of the Netherlands · 3.3 km from Amsterdam52.375° N 4.884° E

    

    From the street, Prinsengracht 263 is an ordinary Amsterdam canal house: built in 1635, refaced in 1740, used over the centuries as a home, a stable-fronted warehouse and a workshop. What makes it one of the most visited museums in the Netherlands is the building behind it. The rear annex, hidden on all four sides by the houses around the courtyard, is where Anne Frank, her parents and sister and four other Jews hid from Nazi persecution for two years and one month, from 1942 until they were arrested in 1944. Anne called it the Achterhuis, the "back house", and that became the title of her diary when it was published in Dutch in 1947; English readers know it as the Secret Annex.

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29. 29 CCTV Headquarters, Beijing

    People's Republic of China · 5.6 km from Beijing39.915° N 116.457° E

    

    Seen from Beijing's East Third Ring Road, the headquarters of China Central Television refuses to behave like a skyscraper. Instead of a single shaft rising to a point, two leaning towers climb out of a shared base and are joined at the top by an overhanging bridge that turns sharply in mid-air, so the whole building forms a closed, three-dimensional loop around an empty centre. The angled upper section reaches out 75 metres into space with nothing below it. Its surface is wrapped in an irregular grid of steel bracing that grows denser where the forces are greatest, making the structure's own stresses visible on the façade. Beijingers quickly gave it a nickname — dà kùchǎ, "big shorts" — said to have been coined by a taxi driver.

    Did you know? The headquarters was built on the 20-hectare site of an abandoned motorcycle factory in Beijing's new Central Business District.

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30. 30 Woolworth Building

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

    

    For sixteen years the tallest building on Earth was a Gothic cathedral built for a five-and-dime fortune. The Woolworth Building at 233 Broadway rises 792 feet (about 241 metres) over City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan, its pale terracotta tower climbing through setbacks to a copper-roofed pyramid crowned with pinnacles. When it opened in 1913 it took the title of world's tallest building from the Metropolitan Life Tower, and held it until 40 Wall Street and the Chrysler Building overtook it in 1929–1930.

    Did you know? A private swimming pool was built in the basement for F. W. Woolworth himself; long drained, it was restored in the 2010s for the new apartments.

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