This is the most beautiful museum in the world

In the 1930s it was a grain silo overlooking the waterfront in Kristiansand, Norway; today it is a museum — and, recently, the most beautiful museum in the world. Called Kunstsilo, it won the Prix Versailles 2025 as the “most beautiful museum” of the year. Designed by Mestres Wåge Arquitectes, BAX, and Mendoza Partida, the project has turned the former industrial structure into a high-intensity cultural venue. At its core is a vast void carved out of the silo’s cylindrical volumes — now the dramatic focal point of the visitor experience.

Opened in 2024, Kunstsilo positions itself as a hub, combining exhibitions with public programs and activities for diverse audiences — a “living” museum rather than a purely monumental one. It is also home to the Tangen Collection, the largest (and among the most significant) collections devoted to Nordic modernism.

Founded in 2015, the Prix Versailles honors recent projects and adaptive reuses that combine architectural excellence, a strong relationship to context, and sustainability; this year’s edition celebrated 72 projects across its various categories. In the same category, the Special Interior Award went to Audeum Audio Museum in Seoul — a private museum dedicated to sound and audio technologies — designed by Kengo Kuma with contributions from designer Kenya Hara. The building is defined by a skin of 20,000 vertically arranged aluminum tubes: an urban veil that turns the idea of “resonance” into a façade and leads into a sequence meant to be experienced with multiple senses, not only sight. The Special Exterior Award went to the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, for the Rhonda & Howard Hawks Pavilion by Snøhetta — a light-filled addition that stitches the campus together, linking the original Art Deco building (1931) with the museum’s 1994 expansion designed by Norman Foster.

The "World's Most Beautiful Museums" selection also includes Grand Palais (Paris), Saka Museum (Bali), Diriyah Art Futures (Riyadh), and Cleveland Museum of Natural History (Cleveland).