The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

William Rockhill Nelson, who founded the Kansas City Star newspaper, and Mary Atkins, a schoolteacher's widow, never met. Each left a fortune for the same idea — a public art museum for Kansas City — and when the money was pooled, the two bequests opened together in 1933 as one institution carrying both their names.

On the great south lawn lie three giant badminton shuttlecocks, each about 18 feet tall, dropped across the grass as if a game were being played over the whole building. Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, a sculptor couple, designed them for the site in 1994, and they have been the museum's signature ever since.

Inside, the range is wide. A Beaux-Arts hall from 1933 holds European painting, while the Chinese Temple Gallery recreates a temple interior around a 12th-century wooden Guanyin of the Southern Sea, seated at ease and counted among the finest such figures outside China. Nearby, one of America's strongest Impressionist rooms was doubled in 2015 by a gift from the businessman Henry Bloch and his wife Marion. Their name also belongs to the newest wing, architect Steven Holl's Bloch Building of 2007, a line of frosted-glass shards that surface from the lawn and glow after dark like blocks of ice.