The Most Remarkable Modern Museums in the World

14 places in 8 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 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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2. 02 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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3. 03 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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4. 04 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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5. 05 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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6. 06 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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7. 07 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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8. 08 Rietveld Schröder House

   Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.5 km from Utrecht52.085° N 5.148° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The Rietveld Schröder House, completed in 1924 at the end of an ordinary brick terrace in Utrecht, is the purest built expression of De Stijl, the Dutch movement of primary colours and straight lines best known through the paintings of Piet Mondrian. It was designed by the furniture maker turned architect Gerrit Rietveld, but the client, Truus Schröder-Schräder, a young widow with three children, shaped it as much as he did. She wanted a house with as few walls as possible, open to the outside and free of the stiff conventions of middle-class domestic life, and the two worked on it side by side.

   Did you know? Schröder had planned to leave Utrecht for Amsterdam, but when no suitable house turned up Rietveld proposed building one, and both independently chose the same plot.

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9. 09 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

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

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The Guggenheim on Fifth Avenue is a museum people visit as much for the building as for the art. Frank Lloyd Wright designed it as a top-heavy spiral that widens as it rises, a shape that looks nothing like the apartment blocks around it on the Upper East Side, facing Central Park. Wright took the commission in 1943; material shortages, rising costs and years of argument meant that design and construction took fifteen years. The building opened on 21 October 1959. Wright had died that April, six months earlier, and it was his last major work.

   Did you know? When the commission was being planned in 1943, Hilla von Rebay assumed the 76-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright was already dead until Guggenheim's wife set her straight.

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10. 10 Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

    Louisiana

    Denmark · 13.8 km from Helsingborg55.969° N 12.543° E

    

    The Louisiana owes its name to a nineteenth-century romantic and its reputation to a cheese wholesaler. The estate on the Øresund coast at Humlebæk was built in 1855 by Alexander Brun, master of the royal hunt, who married three times, each time to a woman called Louise. A century later the businessman Knud W. Jensen bought the neglected villa to found a museum of modern art, kept the poetic name, and opened in 1958. The old house still serves as the main entrance.

    Did you know? Jensen expected about 40,000 visitors in the first year; around 200,000 came.

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11. 11 Grand Egyptian Museum

    Egypt · 7 km from Giza29.994° N 31.120° E

    

    The Grand Egyptian Museum is the largest museum in the world devoted to a single civilisation, and it was built to be seen together with the monuments that inspired it: the site lies about 2 km northwest of the Pyramids of Giza, and its long north and south walls are aligned with the Great Pyramid of Khufu and the Pyramid of Menkaure. The idea surfaced in the early 1990s, when the old Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square was seen as outdated and too small for the collection; construction started in 2005, and after years of delays the museum was formally inaugurated on 1 November 2025, at a cost of about 1.2 billion US dollars.

    Did you know? At the entrance a 3,200-year-old, 110-tonne obelisk of Ramesses II is raised on four pillars, so visitors can walk beneath it and see the cartouche carved on its base.

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12. 12 Fallingwater

    United States39.906° N 79.468° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Fallingwater is the house that Frank Lloyd Wright built over a waterfall — by the 1960s already one of the most discussed modern buildings in the world. It stands in the woods of the Laurel Highlands in southwestern Pennsylvania, on Bear Run, a stream that drops over ledges of sandstone on its way to the Youghiogheny River. The Kaufmanns hired Wright in 1934 to design a weekend retreat for the Pittsburgh department store owner Edgar J. Kaufmann and his wife Liliane; the family began using it in 1937, and a guest wing followed in 1939.

    Did you know? After months with nothing on paper, Wright reportedly drew the whole design in about two hours when Kaufmann turned up unexpectedly at Taliesin in September 1935.

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13. 13 Luis Barragán House and Studio

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

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    From the street, the house that Luis Barragán built for himself in Tacubaya, in western Mexico City, gives almost nothing away: a tall, plain rendered wall the colour of its neighbours, a few small windows, two doors. That refusal is the point. Barragán, the Guadalajara-born architect who won the Pritzker Prize in 1980, turned the house inward, and it is the rooms, light and garden behind that blank front that made it, in 2004, the only private residence in Latin America on UNESCO's World Heritage List.

    Did you know? The yellow glow of the vestibule comes partly from a gold-leaf painting by Mathias Goeritz, one of his Metachromatic Messages, hung above the stairs.

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14. 14 Kröller-Müller Museum

    Kröller Müller Museum

    Kingdom of the Netherlands · 14 km from Arnhem52.096° N 5.817° E

    

    Deep in the heathland and pine forest of the Hoge Veluwe National Park, the Kröller-Müller Museum holds one of the most personal art collections ever turned into a public museum. It was assembled by Helene Kröller-Müller, wife of a wealthy industrialist, who began buying art on the advice of the teacher and critic H. P. Bremmer and bought her first Van Gogh, a small wood scene, in 1908. Over some twenty years she and her husband Anton built up the second-largest Van Gogh collection in the world — today 88 paintings and around 170 works on paper — and in 1935 she handed the whole collection to the Dutch state on condition that a museum be built for it.

    Did you know? The present building was meant only as a temporary museum; Van de Velde's grand Groote Museum was begun in 1921 but halted for lack of money and never finished.

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