National Gallery of Canada

Ottawa's national gallery rises beside the river in glass towers of pink granite, built in 1988 by Moshe Safdie to echo, across the water, the Gothic library of the Parliament buildings on the hill. A giant bronze spider by Louise Bourgeois, nearly nine metres tall and titled Maman, crouches at the entrance with a sac of marble eggs under her belly.

Inside is one of the museum's strangest holdings, an entire 19th-century convent chapel. When the Rideau Street building faced demolition, its fan-vaulted ceiling was taken down in over a thousand pieces and rebuilt indoors, a full Gothic Revival interior standing in a modern hall.

The gallery once set off a national argument. In 1989 it bought Voice of Fire, a Barnett Newman painting of three tall stripes, blue and red, for 1.8 million dollars of public money, and much of the country was furious that a few bands of colour could cost so much. It still hangs here, and for four of its early years, no one noticed it had been placed upside down.