The Most Remarkable Museums in North America
11 places in 3 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable museums in North America are Metropolitan Museum of Art (United States), Museum of Modern Art (United States) and Montreal Biosphère (Canada). The list covers 11 museums in 3 countries. The United States has the most, with 8. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Many of North America's most remarkable museums are remarkable first as buildings. The continent became a laboratory of modern architecture in the twentieth century, and its museums gave architects the freedom to try forms that offices and houses could not: a spiral, a geodesic sphere, a pair of moving wings. Mexico adds a different strength, colonial and modern buildings in which the architecture and the art inside were made to speak to each other.
Frank Lloyd Wright appears twice. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, opened in 1959, replaces galleries with a single spiral ramp that coils upward beneath a skylight. Fallingwater, the house he cantilevered over a waterfall on Bear Run in Pennsylvania, is now a museum of itself. In Montreal, the Biosphère is the steel lattice of Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome, built as the United States pavilion for Expo 67 and now a museum of the environment. Santiago Calatrava's addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum has a sunscreen of steel fins that opens and folds like the wings of a bird.
In Guadalajara, the Hospicio Cabañas, built in the early 1800s as a charitable hospice around dozens of patios, holds José Clemente Orozco's murals, including the Man of Fire in its main dome. Luis Barragán's House and Studio in Mexico City shows how plain walls, coloured planes and controlled light can make a modest building unforgettable. Boston's Mapparium is a three-storey globe of stained glass that visitors cross on a bridge through its centre.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Metropolitan Museum of Art | Museum | United States | |
| 2 | Museum of Modern Art | Museum | United States | |
| 3 | Montreal Biosphère | Museum | Canada | |
| 4 | National Gallery of Art | Museum | United States | |
| 5 | Hospicio Cabañas | Museum | Mexico | |
| 6 | Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum | Museum | United States | ✓ |
| 7 | Fallingwater | Museum | United States | ✓ |
| 8 | Luis Barragán House and Studio | Museum | Mexico | ✓ |
| 9 | USS Missouri | Museum ship | United States | |
| 10 | Milwaukee Art Museum | Museum | United States | |
| 11 | Mapparium | Museum | United States |
01 Metropolitan Museum of Art
United States · 7 km from New York City40.779° N 73.963° W
Image by marekr from Pixabay 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. The Beaux-Arts Fifth Avenue façade, the Great Hall and the Grand Stairway were designed by Richard Morris Hunt and his son Richard Howland Hunt around 1900, McKim, Mead and White added the side wings in 1910, and the glass-walled galleries at the back are by Roche-Dinkeloo. The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden sits on the roof near the south-west corner.
02 Museum of Modern Art
United States · 4.7 km from New York City40.762° N 73.978° W
Erremm · CC BY-SA 4.0 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. The 2019 expansion by Diller Scofidio + Renfro added a great deal of gallery space, and displays are rehung from time to time, so not every famous picture is necessarily on the wall on a given day.
03 Montreal Biosphère
Canada · 4.4 km from Montreal45.514° N 73.531° W
Meg.jenk · CC BY-SA 4.0 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. Fuller had also tried to equip it with motorised shades that would open and close like pores in skin to control the temperature, but the system never worked properly.
Did you know? The escalator inside the US pavilion ran for about 41 metres, and was billed at the time as the longest unsupported escalator anywhere.
04 National Gallery of Art
United States · 1.3 km from Washington38.891° N 77.020° W
Jackson Pollock 1912-1956 · Public domain 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. Pei's modernist East Building, opened in 1978, holds modern and contemporary art; the collection includes the largest mobile Alexander Calder ever made. Between them runs an underground concourse lit by Leo Villareal's Multiverse, a tunnel of about 41,000 programmed LEDs.
05 Hospicio Cabañas
Mexico · 0.8 km from Guadalajara20.677° N 103.337° W
ProtoplasmaKid · CC BY-SA 4.0 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? Orozco himself wrote to the governor of Jalisco that his chapel cycle was the greatest work of the whole Mexican mural movement begun in 1923.
06 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
United States · 7.5 km from New York City40.783° N 73.959° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Jean-Christophe BENOIST · CC BY 3.0 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 produced more than 700 sketches and six sets of working drawings for the building, and its cost ended up roughly double the first estimate.
07 Fallingwater
United States39.906° N 79.468° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by 12019 from Pixabay 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. Inside, the living room floor is waxed flagstone that glints like wet rock in the stream, and in front of the fireplace a boulder from the site breaks through the floor — Wright wanted to cut it flat, Kaufmann insisted it stay. A glass hatch opens onto a stair that descends to a plunge pool just above the stream.
Did you know? Wright was 67 when he took the commission and had completed only two buildings in the previous six years.
08 Luis Barragán House and Studio
Mexico · 7.3 km from Mexico City19.411° N 99.192° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Ymblanter · CC BY-SA 3.0 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. A small, dim entrance with volcanic-stone flooring acts as a buffer against the street; it opens into a tall vestibule washed in yellow light, with one wall painted fuchsia; then, past a low threshold, comes the living room, double height under wooden beams, whose great window frames the garden. The garden itself was left to grow semi-wild behind high walls, and it looks larger than it is because it borrows the neighbours' trees.
Did you know? The living room's great garden window is a single sheet of glass divided by mullions into a cross, an echo of Barragán's Catholic faith.
09 USS Missouri
United States · 11.8 km from Honolulu21.362° N 157.953° W
National Museum of the U.S. Navy · Public domain Her place in history was secured on 2 September 1945 in Tokyo Bay. On her quarterdeck, Japanese representatives led by Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signed the Instrument of Surrender before General Douglas MacArthur and Allied commanders, formally ending the Second World War. That deck is the heart of any visit.
10 Milwaukee Art Museum
United States · 2 km from Milwaukee43.040° N 87.897° W
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay The museum grew out of two institutions founded in 1888, the Layton Art Gallery and the Milwaukee Art Institute, which came together in 1957 inside Eero Saarinen's War Memorial Center, the modernist block that still anchors the complex. A Brutalist extension by David Kahler followed in 1975 to house a major gift of more than six hundred works. Calatrava's addition, set on the axis of Wisconsin Avenue and linked to downtown by the Reiman Bridge, a suspended footbridge hung from a tall angled mast, completed a campus that reads like a short history of twentieth-century architecture.
Did you know? In 2004 the Quadracci Pavilion received the Outstanding Structure Award from the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering.
11 Mapparium
United States · 1.9 km from Boston42.345° N 71.086° W
Christian Science Publishing Society · Public domain The globe was conceived by the architect Chester Lindsay Churchill in the early 1930s, while he was designing the headquarters of the Christian Science Publishing Society in Boston, as an emblem of the international reach of The Christian Science Monitor. He had been struck by the large rotating globe in the lobby of New York's Daily News Building. The glass was made by the Rambusch company of New York, following Rand McNally political maps of 1934, and the room opened on 1 June 1935. The map was never redrawn: proposals to update it in 1939, 1958 and 1966 were turned down, partly over cost and partly because the frozen 1935 world had become a historical document in its own right.
Did you know? The globe is 30 feet across, and its glass panels are held in a bronze framework that also traces the lines of latitude and longitude.
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 remarkable museums in North America?
- On our list, Metropolitan Museum of Art (United States) ranks first, followed by Museum of Modern Art (United States) and Montreal Biosphère (Canada).
- Which country has the most museums in North America?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (8), Mexico (2) and Canada (1).
- What is the Mapparium in Boston?
- The Mapparium is a walk-through globe about 9 metres across, made of stained-glass panels and built in 1935 at the Mary Baker Eddy Library. Its map still shows the world's political borders as they were then, and its curved glass carries a whisper across the room.
- What was the Montreal Biosphère originally?
- It was the United States pavilion at Expo 67, a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller. A fire in 1976 destroyed its acrylic skin, leaving the steel frame that now houses an environment museum.
- Who painted the murals in the Hospicio Cabañas?
- José Clemente Orozco painted them in the late 1930s. The cycle covers the walls and dome of the former chapel, and the building has been a World Heritage Site since 1997.
- How many museums are on this list in North America?
- The list covers 11 museums in 3 countries. The United States has the most, with 8.