Jewish Museum Berlin

Opened in 2001, the Jewish Museum Berlin combines the Baroque Kollegienhaus with an entirely new building by architect Daniel Libeskind, whose design is one of the most discussed pieces of museum architecture built anywhere in the past 30 years. The building's zinc-clad exterior, cut through with jagged, seemingly random window slits, has no conventional front entrance — visitors reach it via an underground passage from the old building, immediately disorienting the usual museum-going experience.

Libeskind built specific architectural experiences into the structure itself. The Axis of Exile leads outside to the Garden of Exile, a grid of 49 tilted concrete columns planted with willow oak that deliberately induces mild disorientation as you walk through it. The Holocaust Tower is an empty, unheated concrete void lit only by a single slit of natural light — visitors typically spend only a minute or two inside, and the room is designed to be unsettling rather than informative in any conventional sense.