19 Beautiful Museums of the World (PHOTOS)

Museums have pretty complex identities, if you think about it. In addition to housing culture, identity, and memories of times gone, they, in and of themselves are also testaments to cultures, identities, and memories of times gone.  

 

Take for example the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris, which houses one of the most extensive collections of French art in the world. The museum houses the world’s largest collection of impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces, by painters including Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Charles Seurat, and Vincent Van Gogh. But look at the structure itself: Built as a Beaux-Arts railway station between 1898 and 1900, it is incredibly striking, unique, and a masterpiece. It is a remnant of the burst of the Industrialization of Paris, and the burst of transportation in Europe at the later part of the 1800s.

 

Oh, but Paris is an exception-- come on, it’s Paris, some might say. And I grant you that, but let’s take a look, then, at the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, FL. The museum houses largest collection of Dalí's works outside Europe. It’s architecture is quirky and striking, much like the man himself. The cuboidal structure is Dali-fied by the steel and glass that looks like it is melting from the building, like the the clocks of ‘The Persistence of Memory.’ This museum is a surreal addition to Florida’s Treasure Coast, and is a testament to the peoples and governments that all made the establishment of the museum possible. 

 

 

Need another example? Take the Museum of Islamic Art, in Doha Qatar. This intentionally built structure was made to be its own beautiful representation of what lies within it. Built on a standalone island, the building’s architect I. M. Pei traveled through the whole Islamic world to be inspired by Islamic architecture and culture, so that the structure he would build would be imbued with the gamut of Islamic beauty. 

 

The Erawan Museum in Thailand, too, is a structure that’s external beauty symbolically and physically encompassed the memory and masterpieces within it. The museum is best known for its three-headed elephant sculpture on the roof, as seen above. The three storeys inside the elephant contain antiquities and  ancient religious artifacts, and is modeled after the Hindu representation of the universe, which consists of the underworld as the first floor, earth as the second floor, and Heaven as the top floor.