The story
The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston has grown into one of the largest art museums in the country, spread across a campus built up by a run of famous architects. The oldest wing was extended by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the German master of steel and glass. A later hall came from the Spaniard Rafael Moneo, and in 2020 a third building opened, designed by Steven Holl with walls of curved, milky glass.
The galleries hold everything from Renaissance gold-ground paintings to a deep collection of Latin American and modern art. But the piece people talk about is underground: to cross between two of the buildings you walk through The Light Inside, a tunnel by the artist James Turrell washed in slow shifts of neon colour, where the floor seems to dissolve and the walls lose their edges.
