Getty Center

You reach the Getty without a car for the last stretch. You park at the bottom of a Brentwood hill and a driverless tram carries you up through the Santa Monica Mountains to a white city on the ridge, with the whole Los Angeles basin spread out below.

The money came from oil. J. Paul Getty was among the richest men of the 20th century, and the trust he left built this campus and keeps it free to enter, so anyone can walk in off the hill. Richard Meier clad it in 1.2 million square feet of rough Italian travertine, the pale stone still showing fossil leaves and shells, and it opened in 1997 after years of delay.

Inside are Van Gogh's Irises, painted in the asylum garden at Saint-Rémy, along with Rembrandt, Turner and a deep collection of illuminated manuscripts. Outside, the artist Robert Irwin planted a living garden that runs down a ravine in a spiral of azaleas, meant to keep changing with the seasons rather than ever be finished.