Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Few American museums give visitors a tour of 20th-century architecture alongside their art. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston spreads across a campus where a 1924 neoclassical building by William Ward Watkin, later extended by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, faces Rafael Moneo's Audrey Jones Beck Building and Steven Holl's luminous Nancy and Rich Kinder Building. James Turrell's light installation The Light Inside fills the underground tunnel linking the older buildings, and Isamu Noguchi designed the Cullen Sculpture Garden across the street.

The collection ranges from antiquity to the present, with European old masters, Impressionist paintings, African and pre-Columbian gold, and decorative arts. Holdings in Latin American art and photography are particularly strong. The Kinder Building is devoted to modern and contemporary work.

Founded as an art league in 1900, the museum opened the first purpose-built art museum in Texas. It also runs two house museums elsewhere in the city, Bayou Bend for American decorative arts and Rienzi for European. Seeing the main buildings properly can fill most of a day.