National Museum of Western Art

The core of this museum began with one man's eye. Kojiro Matsukata, a Japanese shipping magnate, bought European art in bulk in Paris and London in the 1910s and 1920s, meaning to build a gallery back home. Much of it stayed in France, and after the Second World War the French state held it as enemy property. In the 1950s France agreed to return the collection on one condition: Japan had to build a proper museum to house it.

That museum, in Tokyo's Ueno Park, is the only building in Japan designed by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, a spiral of raw concrete meant to grow outward as the collection did. It opened in 1959 and was named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2016. Inside are the Impressionists Matsukata loved, Monet and Renoir among them, and out front stands a garden of Rodin bronzes, including "The Thinker" and "The Gates of Hell."