Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art

Strasbourg opened this glass hall on the bank of the river Ill in 1998 to hold the modern half of its art, everything from about 1870 onward. The building is arranged around one long nave of light, and the collection inside keeps circling back to the city's own.

Three artists born in Strasbourg anchor it. One is Gustave Dore, the 19th-century illustrator whose engravings gave generations their picture of Dante and the Bible. Another is Hans Arp, a founder of Dada in Zurich who made pale, rounded abstract reliefs. The third is the abstract painter Marcelle Cahn.

The room people remember is a reconstruction of a music salon Wassily Kandinsky designed in 1931, its walls covered edge to edge in floating geometric shapes, an attempt to wrap a listener inside a painting. From there the galleries move on through Kandinsky's peers, Picasso and Ernst, toward living artists.