Walking through Louis Kahn’s Center for British Art—where sunlight streams in from skylights, and concrete, wood, metal, and stone combine in precise yet monumental ways­—leaves one yearning for the days when museums, quite honestly, weren’t so sterile.

Rumor has it that the quaint town inspired the architecture in Disney’s animated film Beauty and the Beast. But in a recent renovation of the city’s Musée Unterlinden, Herzog & de Meuron made a conscious effort to avoid the preciousness of a Disney film.

When it was founded in 1935, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) occupied one, then two floors of the War Memorial Veterans Building in the Hayes Valley neighborhood before moving into its purposebuilt, Mario Botta–designed home in nearby SoMa in 1995.

The Singapore government funded the $370 million museum complex, which opened in November 2015 as a highlight of the island-nation’s 50th anniversary as an independent republic.

The Whitworth Gallery, in England’s booming second city, Manchester, is a cultural institution that took a walk in the park back in 1889—it was the first English art museum to adopt a parkland rather than urban setting.

It’s not always easy to be an architect in modern Italy, where contemporary design must measure itself against the weight of historic patrimony.

At 985 feet long, an abandoned Panasonic television factory in Beijing offered tantalizing potential as a cultural space—and huge challenges.

Designing a museum is nothing new for Zaha Hadid Architects. Creating one on top of Mount Kronplatz in northern Italy is something else entirely.