30 Museums From Around The Globe Whose Architecture Is Everything But Plain

The Shanghai Museum of Astronomy just opened to the public on July 18 of this year and it is the largest astronomy museum in the world.

It was designed by Thomas J. Wong and the building doesn't have any straight lines or right angles to reflect shapes of orbits and the geometry of the cosmos.

People visiting the museum will be able to see both temporary and permanent exhibitions exploring instruments and artifacts related to astronomy. It also has a 78 foot (24 meters) tall solar telescope, an observatory, a youth observation camp, and a Digital Sky Theater.

The State Historical Museum in Moscow was established in 1872 and it is located on Red Square’s north side.

The easily recognizable building was designed by Vladimir Osipovich Sherwood in Neo-Russian style.

It is a historical museum with the goal to preserve Russia's past. Among the interesting things that the museum has is a longboat excavated from the banks of the Volga River and manuscripts from the 6th century.

The Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa was opened on September 22, 2017 in Cape Town and it is the largest museum of contemporary African art in the world.

The museum was designed by Thomas Heatherwick, London-based designer. It was born by transforming a grain silo that was no longer being used.

The museum houses art by sculptors, photographers, and painters that work all across Africa.

The Museum of Islamic Art was opened in 2008 and in its collection there are pieces dating back 1,400 years. The exhibitions include metal work, ceramics, jewelry, wood work, textiles, glass and manuscripts.

The building was designed by Ieoh Ming Pei. He suggested that it should be built on the human-made peninsula so that it would not have other buildings overshadowing it. The architect was mostly inspired by the mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo, Egypt.

The Erawan museum in Bangkok was opened in 2003 and it is well known for its three-headed elephant shape.

The museum is the vision of Lek Viriyapant that came true. The elephant is made of bronze and weighs 250 tons. And part of the museum is actually in the elephant.

There are things to see inside too: Chinese vases from the Ming and Qing dynasties, arts like ceramics from Europe, relics and statues of Buddha.

The Salvador Dali museum in St. Petersburg, Florida was founded in 1982. The new building with the glass entryway and skylight was opened on 11 January 2011.

The addition to the museum was designed by Yann Weymouth. The glass bubble is called the enigma and it is made up of 1,062 triangular pieces of glass.

At the museum visitors can find 96 oil paintings, over 100 watercolors and drawings, 1,300 graphics, photographs, sculptures and other items. One of the most famous Dali pieces, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, is housed in this museum.

Guggenheim Bilbao Museum is a contemporary art museum located in Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain. It was opened on 18 October 1997 and it is still one of the biggest museums in the country.

 

The architect of this innovative design was Frank Gehry. The exterior has curvy lines that were meant to seem random. It is all covered in 33,000 extremely thin titanium sheets that, to some critics, resemble fish scales, which is appropriate as it is built alongside the Nervion River.

 

The museum is always changing up its exhibitions and likes to choose a theme, like Russian contemporary art. What you can see the most is Avant-garde art, 20th century abstraction, and non-objective art. The only permanent exhibit is The Matter of Time, a sculpture installation of eight pieces by the US sculptor Richard Serra.

The Museo de Arte Tigre in Buenos Aires was first built in 1912. Originally, it was a luxurious club for the rich and famous, but now it is an art museum that was opened in 2006.

 

The elegant building was designed by Pablo Pater and Luis Dubois following French-Italian architecture styles.

 

The main collection consists of Argentine art from the 19th and 20th centuries but the interior is a work of art in itself too with Venetian mirrors and French chandeliers.

National Museum of Qatar was opened in 2019 and is dedicated to showcasing the story of Qatar and its nation.

 

The intricate building was designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel, who was inspired by the desert rose, which can be found in Qatar’s desert regions.

 

The museum has 11 galleries and each one will be a different experience. The stories are told by triggering people's senses by combining sound, images, videos and even smell.

The Milwaukee Art Museum was founded in 1888 and now has gathered a collection of 30,000 works of art.

 

The most intriguing part of the museum is the Quadracci Pavilion designed by Santiago Calatrava and opened in 2001. The building has moving wings that change position depending on the time of the day to provide shade.

 

The works of art in the collection range from works from antiquity to the present. That includes paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, decorative arts, photographs, and folk and self-taught art.

The City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia is a cultural and architectural complex opened in 1998. It houses a planetarium, a cinema, a museum and auditoriums for events.

 

The complex was designed by Santiago Calatrava and Félix Candela. The museum that is part of the complex is reminiscent of a skeleton of a whale.

 

The museum is dedicated to science, technology and the environment. It's a very interactive museum where you learn through touch and experience.

Museum of the Future is due to open later this year and it is expected to be a new landmark for the UAE, located just a seven-minute drive away from the Burj Khalifa skyscraper.

 

The torus-shaped building was designed by architectural firm Killa Design. It is 77 meters high (253 feet) and it is covered in Arabic calligraphy. But it's not just random. They are actually lines from a poem by ruler Sheikh Al Maktoum.

 

The UAE is always striving to develop and a museum dedicated to the future is a perfect symbol for that. It will be an incubator for ideas: you will be able to see technology that will hopefully be turned to reality in the future, benefiting people and making our lives better.

The Jewish Museum Berlin was opened in 2001 and it is the largest museum in Europe that focuses only on Jewish history. Even before it was finished in 1999, the museum design was awarded the German Architecture Prize.

 

The building consists of two parts: a Baroque building and a newer building that came to reality from the designs of Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind. What is characteristic to the building are the voids, empty rooms, dead ends and dim lighting, all creating an atmosphere of loss and absence which the Holocaust caused.

 

The museum mainly focuses on the history of Jews in Germany and the story they are telling goes back to the Middle Ages and continues to the present day.

The museum was first established as the Edmonton Museum of Arts in 1924. The modern building where the gallery is was opened in 2010.

 

The architect chosen to design a building for the gallery was Randall Stout. The curves of the stainless steel are meant to look like northern lights which are characteristic to Alberta.

 

The collection of the gallery focuses more on works, which include sculptures, paintings and photographs, created in Alberta or western Canada and most of them were produced after the 1950s.

The Ordos Museum in China is an art and history museum that was opened in 2011.

It was designed by MAD Architects to be an amorphous building which was inspired by the Gobi desert where the museum is built.

The museum's collection presents the surrounding area's history as well as Mongolian history in general.

The museum which houses Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art was first founded in 1939 by philanthropist Solomon R. Guggenheim. At first it stayed in rented spaces, but in 1959, it moved to the Upper East Side neighborhood of Manhattan in New York.

 

The building to which it moved to was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was the architect's last project and one of his longest works, but also one of the most popular ones.

 

The Guggenheim museum is definitely a spot of attraction and it is actually a UNESCO site as part of The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright since 2019.

The Andalusia Museum of Memory is located in Granada and was finished in 2009. The museum focuses on the history of Andalusia as the inhabitants of this land were once called the most educated of the Iberians.

 

The project was designed by Alberto Campo Baeza. The architect describes his work himself: "It is organized around a central courtyard of elliptical traces in which helical ramps develop that connect the three levels and create a spatial tension of great interest."

 

After visiting this museum, you will leave with detailed information about Andalusia's history.

The Heydar Aliyev Center was opened on 10 May 2012 in Azerbaijan's capital, Baku. It is named after Heydar Aliyev, who was the first secretary of Soviet Azerbaijan (1969-1982) and president of the Azerbaijan Republic (1993-2003).

 

It was designed by Zaha Hadid, who decided to make the structure seem fluid and almost undulating. It is definitely a unique building as in 2014, the Center won the Design Museum's Design of the Year Award. It was an important win as that meant that the designer Zaha Hadid was the first woman to win the top prize in that competition.

 

The Center is complex and it has a conference hall, a gallery hall and a museum. The former is the most interesting part of the establishment and it showcases Azerbaijan's history as well as the impact the leader Heydar Aliyev had on it.

The M/S Maritime Museum of Denmark was established in 1915 and moved in 2013. The museum is dedicated to showcase Danish trade and shipping from the 15th century to the present day.

The new museum was designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). What is interesting about this museum's location is that it's kind of underground as it is built in a former Helsingør dry dock. The dock itself remains empty and the museum space is on the ramps and bridges crossing the dock.

For its unique design the museum has received a few awards, including Architizer A+ Award, 2014 RIBA EU Award, AIANY Design Award 2014 and others.

Niteroi Contemporary Art Museum is located in Niterói and is one of the city's main landmarks since it opened in 1966.

 

The unusual and futuristic shape that resembles a flying saucer was an idea by the designer Oscar Niemeyer. The architect himself described his work as a ‘flower growing from the rocks.’

 

The main chunk of the museum's collection is 1,200 pieces that were gifted by art collector João Sattamini. They are mostly works of Brazilian artists from the 1950s to the early 1990s.