The Most Remarkable Museums in the United States
8 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable museums in the United States are Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art and National Gallery of Art. The list covers 8 museums. Last updated 14 October 2026.
American museums often compete as architecture first. Wealthy patrons and ambitious cities hired the boldest designers of their day, so the country's most memorable museums are as famous for their walls, ramps and wings as for what hangs inside, and one of them is simply a house that became the exhibit.
Frank Lloyd Wright's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, opened in 1959, coils a continuous ramp around a skylit atrium above Fifth Avenue. Wright's Fallingwater, built in the 1930s for the Kaufmann family in Pennsylvania, cantilevers its concrete terraces directly over the waterfall of Bear Run. The Milwaukee Art Museum's Quadracci Pavilion by Santiago Calatrava has a sunscreen of steel fins that opens and closes like wings over Lake Michigan. In Boston, the Mapparium is a three-storey stained-glass globe that visitors cross on a bridge through its centre, still showing the political borders of the 1930s.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Metropolitan Museum of Art | Museum | |
| 2 | Museum of Modern Art | Museum | |
| 3 | National Gallery of Art | Museum | |
| 4 | Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum | Museum | ✓ |
| 5 | Fallingwater | Museum | ✓ |
| 6 | USS Missouri | Museum ship | |
| 7 | Milwaukee Art Museum | Museum | |
| 8 | Mapparium | Museum |
01 Metropolitan Museum of Art
United States · 7 km from New York City40.779° N 73.963° W
Image by marekr from Pixabay The Met also runs The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park in northern Manhattan, a museum of medieval European art opened in 1938 that incorporates parts of five French cloisters.
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 Take a break in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, redesigned by Philip Johnson in 1953, a paved courtyard with trees, pools and sculpture set among the Midtown towers. Yoshio Taniguchi's rebuilding in the early 2000s nearly doubled the museum's space. The museum also runs MoMA PS1, a contemporary art centre in a former school in Long Island City, Queens.
03 National Gallery of Art
United States · 1.3 km from Washington38.891° N 77.020° W
Jackson Pollock 1912-1956 · Public domain The third part is the Sculpture Garden, opened in 1999, with works by artists including Roy Lichtenstein, Marc Chagall, David Smith and Sol LeWitt set around a fountain pool that becomes an ice rink in winter. The site has an older history too: the gallery stands where the Baltimore and Potomac railroad station once stood, the place where President James Garfield was shot in 1881.
04 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 Special exhibitions run throughout the year, so what you see on the ramp changes. Nearly 861,000 people visited in 2023. Wright, dismissing his critics, said that for the first time art would be seen through an open window, and that his building complemented the park across the street.
Did you know? His early concept was nicknamed an inverted ziggurat, because the spiral resembled the stepped temple towers of ancient Mesopotamia turned upside down.
05 Fallingwater
United States39.906° N 79.468° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by 12019 from Pixabay After Edgar Kaufmann Jr., the couple's son, the house passed to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, which has run it as a museum since the 1960s and manages the 2,000-hectare forest around it. The house is seen on tours of varying length; standard tours cover part of the house and do not allow photography, while extended tours cover all of it. Wright's Kentuck Knob, another house open to visitors, is an 11 km drive away.
Did you know? Pittsburgh engineers hired by Kaufmann listed at least eight structural problems and advised against building; their report was allegedly sealed inside a wall of the house.
06 USS Missouri
United States · 11.8 km from Honolulu21.362° N 157.953° W
National Museum of the U.S. Navy · Public domain The mooring is symbolic. Missouri lies on Battleship Row about 460 metres from the USS Arizona Memorial, so the ship where the war ended looks toward the ship whose destruction on 7 December 1941 brought the United States into it; her bow faces the Arizona as if keeping watch. Aboard, visitors walk the decks, stand beneath the massive gun turrets, and explore restored areas of the superstructure including the bridge, chart house and captain's sea cabin.
07 Milwaukee Art Museum
United States · 2 km from Milwaukee43.040° N 87.897° W
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay The collection, close to 35,000 works, is worth the visit on its own. It is especially strong in Georgia O'Keeffe, in German Expressionism, in American painting of the Ashcan School and in Haitian art — an unusual mix that gives the galleries a character of their own.
Did you know? The museum's roots go back to April 1888, when the meatpacker Frederick Layton opened his gallery with a $100,000 endowment.
08 Mapparium
United States · 1.9 km from Boston42.345° N 71.086° W
Christian Science Publishing Society · Public domain The Mapparium is part of the Christian Science complex in Boston's Back Bay, a district of nineteenth-century brownstone streets laid out on land reclaimed from the tidal flats of the Charles River.
Did you know? Craftsmen at the Rambusch company spent most of a year hand-tracing sections of a 1934 Rand McNally map onto thick glass panels imported from England.
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 the United States?
- On our list, Metropolitan Museum of Art ranks first, followed by Museum of Modern Art and National Gallery of Art.
- Did Frank Lloyd Wright see the Guggenheim open?
- No. Wright died in April 1959, about six months before the museum opened in October of that year, after some 16 years of work on the project.
- Why is Fallingwater built over a waterfall?
- Edgar Kaufmann expected a house with a view of the falls on Bear Run, but Wright placed it directly above them, anchored to the rock, so the family would live with the waterfall rather than look at it.
- What is the Mapparium?
- It is a walk-through globe of 608 stained-glass panels in the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston, completed in 1935. Its map has never been updated, and the curved glass creates unusual acoustic effects across the bridge.
- How many museums are on this list in the United States?
- The list covers 8 museums.