The Most Beautiful Modern Squares, Streets and Monuments in the World
15 places in 9 countries · updated 6 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful modern squares, streets and monuments in the world are Fernsehturm Berlin (Germany), Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Germany) and Space Needle (United States). The list covers 15 modern squares, streets and monuments in 9 countries. Japan has the most, with 3. Last updated 6 October 2026.
Monuments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries speak a different language from the equestrian statues and triumphal arches that came before them. Concrete, steel and new engineering allowed figures and towers of unprecedented height, while two world wars changed what a memorial was meant to do: instead of celebrating victory, many of the most powerful modern monuments ask visitors to remember loss. Alongside them stand the broadcast and observation towers that became the emblems of their cities.
In Berlin the Fernsehturm, completed in 1969, rises over Alexanderplatz with its steel sphere, and a short walk away Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe fills a city block with a field of grey concrete stelae of varying height. In Hiroshima the skeletal dome of the former Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall was left standing as it was after the atomic bombing of 1945.
Christ the Redeemer has stood with open arms on the summit of Corcovado above Rio de Janeiro since 1931, and in Volgograd The Motherland Calls raises her sword over Mamayev Kurgan. Vera Mukhina's stainless-steel Worker and Kolkhoz Woman was made for the 1937 Paris exposition. The Space Needle was built for the 1962 Seattle World's Fair, Toronto's CN Tower, Tokyo Skytree and the twisting Canton Tower push the observation deck ever higher, and the Lincoln Memorial frames Daniel Chester French's seated statue in a Greek temple.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fernsehturm Berlin | Observation tower | Germany | |
| 2 | Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe | War memorial | Germany | |
| 3 | Space Needle | Observation tower | United States | |
| 4 | Hiroshima Peace Memorial | War memorial | Japan | ✓ |
| 5 | Christ the Redeemer | Sculpture | Brazil | |
| 6 | CN Tower | Observation tower | Canada | |
| 7 | The Motherland Calls | War memorial | Russia | |
| 8 | Tokyo Skytree | Observation tower | Japan | |
| 9 | Canton Tower | Observation tower | People's Republic of China | |
| 10 | Tokyo Tower | Observation tower | Japan | |
| 11 | Worker and Kolkhoz Woman | Sculpture | Russia | |
| 12 | Lincoln Memorial | Monument | United States | |
| 13 | Ještěd Tower | Observation tower | Czech Republic | |
| 14 | Mirador del Río | Scenic viewpoint | Spain | |
| 15 | Dead Horse Point State Park | Scenic viewpoint | United States |
01 Fernsehturm Berlin
Berliner Fernsehturm
Germany · 0.7 km from Berlin52.521° N 13.409° E
Image by BernardoUPloud from Pixabay 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.
02 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas
Germany · 1.8 km from Berlin52.514° N 13.379° E
Dietmar Rabich · CC BY-SA 4.0 Two blocks from the Brandenburg Gate, on ground where the Berlin Wall's death strip once ran, a field of 2,711 grey concrete blocks tilts gently across 1.9 hectares. Seen from the pavement it looks almost calm: low slabs at the edges, a grid of rows, nothing that announces itself. The memorial to the Jews murdered in Europe works only when you walk into it. The ground sinks beneath you, the stelae rise to more than four and a half metres, the city noise thins out, and within a few steps you are alone in a narrow grey corridor with no sense of where the others have gone.
Did you know? The memorial's 2,711 stelae are arranged in 54 rows running north to south and 87 rows running east to west.
03 Space Needle
United States · 3.4 km from Seattle47.620° N 122.349° W
Image by Sebastian_127 from Pixabay 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.
04 Hiroshima Peace Memorial
Japan · 1.3 km from Hiroshima34.396° N 132.454° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
DXR · CC BY-SA 4.0 The building now known across the world as the Atomic Bomb Dome was completed in April 1915 as an exhibition hall for the products of Hiroshima Prefecture. Its designer, the Czech architect Jan Letzel, gave it a distinctive dome that made it a landmark on the riverbank next to the Aioi Bridge. At 8:15 in the morning on 6 August 1945 the first atomic bomb used in war exploded almost directly above it, about 600 metres up and some 150 metres to one side. Everyone inside was killed instantly. Because the blast came from above, the vertical walls and columns held, and the building was one of very few left standing near the hypocentre.
Did you know? The bomb's aiming point was the T-shaped Aioi Bridge nearby, but it missed by about 240 metres and burst above Shima Hospital.
05 Christ the Redeemer
Cristo Redentor
Brazil · 4.9 km from Rio de Janeiro22.952° S 43.210° W
Image by FlaviaPadula from Pixabay The statue is as much a French project as a Brazilian one. Engineer Heitor da Silva Costa won the 1922 competition to design it, then spent years in Europe developing the plans, where he brought on French sculptor Paul Landowski — who ended up designing the head and hands — while the face itself was modeled by a Romanian-born sculptor, Gheorghe Leonida. Three nationalities, working across two continents, to build Rio's most recognizable landmark.
Did you know? The statue is 30 metres tall on an 8-metre pedestal, its outstretched arms span 28 metres, and it weighs about 635 tonnes.
06 CN Tower
Canada · 2.4 km from Toronto43.643° N 79.387° W
Image by jameswheeler from Pixabay 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.
07 The Motherland Calls
Russia · 4.4 km from Volgograd48.742° N 44.537° E
Image by alex1983 from Pixabay The Motherland Calls stands on top of Mamayev Kurgan, the hill above the Volga in Volgograd that was fought over almost continuously during the Battle of Stalingrad, from September 1942 to January 1943. A woman in a wind-blown robe strides forward with a sword raised in her right hand and her left arm flung back, summoning the country to fight. From the base of the pedestal to the tip of the sword the monument measures 85 metres; the figure alone is 52 metres. When the memorial complex was dedicated on 15 October 1967 it was the tallest statue in the world.
Did you know? The body was modelled on Valentina Izotova, a 26-year-old waitress, with discus thrower Nina Dumbadze also an influence; the face is thought to recall the sculptor's wife.
08 Tokyo Skytree
Japan · 6.1 km from Tokyo35.710° N 139.811° E
Image by cegoh from Pixabay 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.
09 Canton Tower
People's Republic of China · 6.1 km from Guangzhou23.109° N 113.319° E
Image by AndyLeungHK from Pixabay 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.
10 Tokyo Tower
Japan · 3.2 km from Tokyo35.659° N 139.746° E
Image by LittleMouse from Pixabay Tokyo Tower was completed in 1958 as a transmitter for the Kantō region and as a symbol of Japan's recovery after the war. The engineer Tachū Naitō, a designer of tall buildings in earthquake country, took the Eiffel Tower as his model, and when its antenna was bolted into place in October 1958 the tower, at 332.9 metres, overtook its Parisian model by nine metres to become the tallest freestanding tower in the world. It is far lighter, around 4,000 tons against the Eiffel Tower's 7,300, and about a third of its steel came from scrap, including US tanks damaged in the Korean War.
Did you know? The tower's owner first wanted it taller than the Empire State Building, but money and materials ran short, and broadcast range set the final height.
11 Worker and Kolkhoz Woman
Russia · 8.5 km from Moscow55.828° N 37.647° E
Image by EvgeniT from Pixabay A man and a woman in stainless steel stride forward, raising a hammer and a sickle so that together they form the Soviet emblem: Worker and Kolkhoz Woman is the defining image of Soviet socialist realism, rendered with an Art Deco sense of movement. The idea and composition came from the architect Boris Iofan, who designed the Soviet pavilion for the 1937 World's Fair in Paris and wanted it crowned by a sculptural group; Vera Mukhina gave the figures their form. In Paris the Soviet and German pavilions were placed face to face across the main boulevard by the Trocadéro, and the pair, striding from west to east along the pavilion's axis, carried a message no visitor missed. Mukhina drew on classical and French models, including the Tyrannicides, the Winged Victory of Samothrace and Rude's Marseillaise on the Arc de Triomphe.
Did you know? The figures stand 24.5 metres tall, yet their steel skin weighs only about 12 tonnes, hung on an internal frame of some 63 tonnes.
12 Lincoln Memorial
United States · 3.6 km from Washington38.889° N 77.050° W
Image by MarkThomas from Pixabay The Lincoln Memorial closes the western end of the National Mall like the temple at the end of a sacred way. The architect Henry Bacon gave it the form of a Greek Doric temple in white Yule marble from Colorado, ringed by 36 fluted columns, one for each state of the Union at the time of Lincoln's death, with the names of the 48 states of 1922 carved above. Critics at the time thought a temple too grand for so plain a man; the building was dedicated on 30 May 1922, and in 2007 American architects ranked it seventh among the country's favourite buildings.
Did you know? The statue was first planned at 10 feet but enlarged to 19 so it would not be dwarfed by the hall; standing, Lincoln would be about 28 feet tall.
13 Ještěd Tower
Ještěd
Czech Republic · 10.1 km from Liberec50.733° N 14.985° E
Image by ivabalk from Pixabay From almost anywhere in Liberec you can see it: on the bare summit of Ještěd, 1,012 metres up and about six kilometres from the town centre, stands a silver cone that looks less like a building than like something that has landed. It is a television transmitter and a mountain hotel folded into a single shape — a hyperboloid of reinforced concrete about 94 metres tall, clad in aluminium and glass. The curve is not a stylistic whim: it continues the silhouette of the mountain into the sky, and it is built to withstand the harsh climate of an exposed summit.
Did you know? Eleven architects and teams entered the 1963 design competition, and Hubáček's entry was the only one to meet both the hotel and transmitter briefs.
14 Mirador del Río
Spain · 27.8 km from Arrecife29.214° N 13.481° W
Image by lapping from Pixabay Mirador del Río is a viewpoint at the northern tip of Lanzarote that is almost invisible until you are inside it. César Manrique, the island's artist and architect, built it between 1971 and 1973 into the edge of the Famara cliffs at a spot called Batería del Río, about 475 metres above the sea, and clad it in rough volcanic stone so that from the outside it reads as part of the rock. Entry is through a narrow, winding passage that shuts out the view entirely, which is the point: it opens suddenly into two broad vaulted rooms, and the full width of the ocean appears at once through two great windows that Manrique called the eyes of the Mirador.
Did you know? A sculpture of a bird and a fish greets visitors at the entrance, introducing the twin themes of air and sea.
15 Dead Horse Point State Park
United States · 17.7 km from Moab38.506° N 109.733° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by ducken99 from Pixabay Dead Horse Point is a narrow finger of mesa in southeastern Utah that ends in a sheer drop of about 2,000 feet (610 m) to the Colorado River. From the overlook at its tip the river makes a tight gooseneck loop directly below, a green-edged ribbon of water folded around a tower of red rock, while the canyon country spreads to the horizon in stepped layers of cliffs, benches and buttes. It is one of the most complete views of the Colorado Plateau from a single point, and it changes completely with the light: flat and hazy at noon, glowing orange and throwing long shadows at sunrise and sunset.
Did you know? Just before the point the mesa pinches to a neck only about 30 yards wide, which is why it could be fenced off so easily.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful modern squares, streets and monuments in the world?
- On our list, Fernsehturm Berlin (Germany) ranks first, followed by Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Germany) and Space Needle (United States).
- Which country has the most modern squares, streets and monuments in the world?
- In our collection, the most come from Japan (3), the United States (3) and Germany (2).
- Who designed the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe?
- The memorial in Berlin was designed by the American architect Peter Eisenman and opened in 2005. It consists of 2,711 concrete stelae arranged in a grid on a sloping site.
- Why was the Hiroshima Peace Memorial left in ruins?
- The domed exhibition hall was one of the few structures left standing near the hypocentre of the 1945 atomic bombing. It was preserved as it was found, as a reminder of the destruction, and became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996.
- When was Christ the Redeemer built?
- The statue on Corcovado was completed in 1931. It was designed by the French sculptor Paul Landowski and built of reinforced concrete faced with soapstone tiles.
- How many modern squares, streets and monuments are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 15 modern squares, streets and monuments in 9 countries. Japan has the most, with 3.