Tate Modern

Tate Modern opened in 2000 inside the decommissioned Bankside Power Station, a brutalist 1950s building designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (who also designed the classic British red telephone box). The conversion, by architects Herzog & de Meuron, deliberately kept the industrial bones of the building intact — the result is one of the most striking gallery spaces in the world before you even reach the art.

The centrepiece is the Turbine Hall, a cavernous former engine room five storeys high that has hosted a rotating series of ambitious, often room-filling commissions since 2000, from Olafur Eliasson's giant indoor sun to Ai Weiwei's field of hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds. The permanent collection upstairs covers international modern and contemporary art from roughly 1900 onward — Matisse, Picasso, Rothko, Warhol and Dalí all feature, alongside a strong contemporary and global-art programme that goes well beyond the traditional Western modernist canon.