The World's Most Famous Museum Buildings

Among the best-known museum buildings are the Altes Museum in Berlin and the British Museum in London, 19th-century temples of art; the Guggenheim Museum in New York with its spiral ramp; the Centre Pompidou in Paris with its technology on the outside; and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which gave its name to the Bilbao effect. Also here are the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas, known for its light, and Tate Modern in London, a power station that became a museum. Here they are in the order in which they were built, and what each building says about its age's view of art.

Facts

Temples of art: the 19th century

The public art museum is a young building type. For a long time collections were displayed in palaces, and only around 1800 did people begin to design buildings for showing art to the public. The Altes Museum in Berlin, designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and completed in 1830, is one of the first. Facing the Lustgarten runs a colonnade of eighteen Ionic columns, and in the centre stands a rotunda modelled on the Pantheon. The building showed that the museum was an institution for the whole people, as worthy as a temple.

The British Museum in London, designed by Robert Smirke and built in 1823–1852, has a south façade with 44 Ionic columns. It is one of the largest buildings of the Greek Revival. In the middle of the building, in 2000, Norman Foster placed a glass roof over the great courtyard, one of the first encounters between old museum architecture and new in this list.

Later in the 19th century, museums took their models from Renaissance palaces and from medieval churches. The Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, designed by the German Friedrich August Stüler and completed in 1866, is built in Venetian and Florentine neo-Renaissance style, and the galleries were arranged according to the history of art. Among the works hanging here is The Lady with the Veil. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Pierre Cuypers's major work of 1885, is a cathedral to art in red brick, with a cycle path running straight through the building. Its most famous painting is The Night Watch.

Modernism: the route and the light

After the Second World War, architects began to ask how art should be experienced, not just what the museum should look like. Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue in New York, which opened in 1959, is a white concrete spiral that widens upwards. Visitors take the lift to the top and walk down a ramp in six turns around a central well of light, and the art hangs along the curving walls of the ramp. Artists have complained about the slope, but the building made the museum a landmark.

Louisiana in Humlebæk north of Copenhagen, opened in 1958 and designed by Jørgen Bo and Vilhelm Wohlert, does the opposite. Glazed corridors link an old villa with low, whitewashed pavilions in a park by the Øresund, and the architecture is so discreet that the landscape and the art take the leading role.

Louis Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, of 1972, consists of long concrete vaults with a narrow slit of light along the crown. Beneath the slit hangs a reflector of perforated aluminium that spreads a silvery daylight over the paintings. It is regarded as one of the most beautiful rooms in which to see art in the 20th century.

The museum as machine and as sculpture

The Centre Pompidou in Paris, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers and opened in 1977, put everything that is usually hidden on the outside. The steel frame, the pipes and the escalator are on the exterior, colour-coded by function, and inside the floors are left entirely free. The building became a manifesto for high-tech architecture and a cultural centre more than a temple.

James Stirling's Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart of 1984 responded with postmodern play: a classical rotunda without a roof, stone façades with blocks that seem to have fallen from the wall, and brightly coloured handrails. Ten years later came the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, where Frank Gehry clad an art museum by the river in titanium sheeting in free, undulating forms that could be designed and built only with the help of the computer. It transformed the image of an industrial city and gave its name to the Bilbao effect: the idea that a spectacular building can lift an entire city.

Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin of 1999 is a zigzag-shaped building in zinc, with windows that cut through the façade and voids that cannot be entered. The building tells its story even before it has been filled with objects. Gehry, Libeskind and Zaha Hadid are discussed in the guide to Deconstructivism.

Rebuilt and new after 2000

One of the most visited art museums in the world was originally a coal-fired power station. Tate Modern on the Thames opened in 2000 in Giles Gilbert Scott's brick building, where Herzog & de Meuron kept the vast Turbine Hall as an indoor square for large works and placed a light box of glass on top. In Stockholm, Rafael Moneo built Moderna Museet on Skeppsholmen at the same time, a row of low pavilions with pyramid-shaped lanterns that give the art an even daylight from above.

Zaha Hadid's MAXXI in Rome, completed in 2010, is built of ribbons of concrete and glass that wind and cross one another, so that the rooms flow into each other. The Moesgaard Museum outside Aarhus, by Henning Larsen Architects in 2014, has a grass-covered roof that slopes up out of the landscape and is used as a sledging hill. The Louvre Abu Dhabi by Jean Nouvel, opened in 2017, lies like a city of white cubes beneath a vast dome of star patterns that filters the sun.

What should you look for?

Every museum building answers three questions. How does the light come in? From above through lanterns and vaults, as at the Kimbell and Moderna Museet, or through large glass walls onto a landscape, as at Louisiana. How does the visitor move? Through a fixed sequence of galleries, as in 19th-century museums, down a ramp, as at the Guggenheim, or freely through open spaces. And what does the building want to say to the city? A temple says that art is exalted, a machine that it is open to all, a sculpture that the city wants to be seen.

All the buildings are on the map below. The works of art in the collections, from The Night Watch in Amsterdam to Studio Interior at Moderna Museet, can be found on the map in the art section, and the architecture around them in the guide to the most important buildings of the 20th century.

What to look for

Exercise

What is the idea called that a spectacular museum building can transform an entire city?