From a futuristic sci-fi attraction in Los Angeles to a dramatic monument to a millennia-old Aboriginal civilisation, these long-awaited museums are worth travelling for.
Museums are scaling up. In the year ahead, a wave of new landmark cultural centres will be redefining skylines from Chicago to Central Asia.
While vastly varied in scope, these buildings – some designed by world-renowned architects – show how museums can help define a city while attracting visitors from around the globe. The phenomenon even has a name: the “Bilbao effect“, which describes how tourism skyrocketed in the provincial Spanish city after it opened its Guggenheim museum in 1997.
This year, museum planners hope to recreate the magic with another new Guggenheim, along with other ambitious openings.
Who picked the list?
Virginia-based journalist Larry Bleiberg has spent 30 years writing about the intersection of travel, history and culture. He is the kind of traveller who stops for every historical marker and considers a museum pass an essential travel accessory.
From Europe’s newest outpost of modern and contemporary art to starchitect Frank Gehry’s posthumous showstopper, here are some notable new museums worth travelling to see.
Lucas Museum of Narrative ArtLucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles
Shaped like a giant flying saucer, Los Angeles’ newest cultural attraction looks like something Star Wars creator George Lucas might have featured in one of his films. It’s no coincidence, the eponymous Lucas Museum of Narrative Art was founded by the acclaimed director and his wife Mellody Hobson, and will include props and costumes from the beloved sci-fi saga when it opens in September. But the museum casts a wider net than film.
Dedicated to narrative art, the museum cost $1bn (£735m) to build and will draw from a collection of more than 40,000 items, including works by painters Norman Rockwell, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, as well as writer and illustrator Beatrix Potter. Other pieces come from legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby, who co-created much of the Marvel Comics universe, and R Crumb, whose underground comics found a following during the 1960s and ’70s. Also well-represented: artist Ralph McQuarrie, who designed the original look of Star Wars, including Darth Vader and robots, C-3PO and R2-D2.
The five-storey, 300,000sq-ft museum offers a grand setting for exhibits and contains two theatres. Located in South Los Angeles’ Exposition Park, already home to some of the city’s top-visited museums and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the building is part of an 11-acre campus with an outdoor park, amphitheatre, hanging garden and waterfall fountain.
Also new in Los Angeles: Dataland, devoted to artificial intelligence-produced art, is opening in spring 2026.
Gehry Partners, LLPGuggenheim Abu Dhabi, UAE
Since New York City’s iconic spiral-shaped Frank Lloyd Wright building opened in 1959, the Guggenheim Foundation’s museums have married architectural exuberance with art. Its newest location, designed by Frank Gehry, who died in December, is another visual show-stopper. The 450,000sq-ft Guggenheim Abu Dhabi greets visitors with a Land of Oz-esque skyline – a soaring collection of sweeping metal sheets and sails. Instead of one building, it’s several galleries connected by glass bridges and catwalks.
Architectural critic, curator and professor Aaron Betsky, who worked with Gehry, says the $1bn building will stand as one of the late architect’s great cultural monuments. It shows “his ability to create forms that at first glance seem to be a riot of stuff and on closer inspection are very carefully controlled and complex”.
Located on Saadiyat Island near downtown Abu Dhabi, the new museum (expected to open this year with no confirmed date yet), anchors a cultural district that includes an outpost of the Louvre. It helps cement the city as a cultural destination for travellers, says Betsky.
Exhibits will showcase artists from the 1960s to the present, including some heavy-hitters like Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. But the museum plans to focus on artists from western and southern Asia as well as North Africa. Visitors can expect monumental works and site-specific installations.
Also new in Abu Dhabi: The Zayed National Museum, which features galleries on the country’s history, culture and archaeology, opened in December.
Rossi Architects/Susan Dugdale & AssociatesLarrakia Cultural Centre, Darwin
The Larrakia Cultural Centre is a striking new museum opening in September in Darwin, the capital of the Australia’s Northern Territory. The harbourfront building has a roof shaped like a bird in flight, evoking an ancestral spirit. Built on the sacred land of the Indigenous Larrakia people, it’s the latest example of a shift from museums about native people to museums owned and operated by them.
The Larrakia, who have lived in the region for tens of thousands of years, have been working on the project for decades. “The centre will be a place of truth-telling, learning and celebration,” Malarndirri McCarthy, the country’s Minister for Indigenous Australians, said in a statement. It’s hoped that visitors will come to the museum before heading out to explore other Indigenous sites in the region with cultural ties to the Larrakia, such as Kakadu National Park and the Tiwi Islands.
The A$60m (£31.2m) centre is opening in September and will display traditional and ceremonial artefacts, some of which were repatriated only recently. Last year, the Fowler Museum at the University of California-Los Angeles returned a kangaroo-tooth headband and glass spear points that were acquired in the late 19th and early 20th Century. A few months later, Larrakia elders travelled to England to reclaim 33 spears, spear throwers and a club from the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery.
In addition to galleries and art studios, the centre will have an outdoor auditorium with sand performance and saltwater ceremonial areas and spaces to teach the Larrakia culture. It will also have a restaurant featuring indigenous flavours, and a shop selling Larrakia arts and crafts.
Also new in Australia: Late this year, Sydney will welcome Powerhouse Parramatta, an art, design, science and technology centre that will be the largest museum in New South Wales.
The Obama FoundationObama Presidential Center, Chicago
Former US president Barack Obama returns to the spotlight with the Obama Presidential Center that not only honours his legacy, but also focuses on boosting the surrounding South Side Chicago neighbourhood, where his wife Michelle grew up.
The 19-acre complex, designed by architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, includes pieces by renowned artists like Jenny Holzer and Theaster Gates. But it also has a basketball court, playground and public library, all open to the public. “We can’t wait to see this place come to life,” Michelle Obama said at the groundbreaking five years ago.
The eight-storey granite museum is designed to resemble four hands coming together. It will include artefacts and mementos from Obama’s two presidential terms, including a full-size replica of the Oval Office and the First Lady’s dresses.
A top-floor Sky Room offers sweeping views of the neighbourhood and nearby Lake Michigan. There’s also an 83ft abstract painted glass piece, and a sculptural water feature by architect Maya Lin. The building is adorned with words from Obama’s “You are America” speech delivered in Selma, Alabama, on the 50th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday civil rights march. The $700m (£511m) campus is set to open in June.
Also new in Chicago: A few blocks away, the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry will open a major new permanent exhibit, Powering the Future, using interactive displays to explore the role energy plays in modern life.
Getty ImagesKanal-Pompidou, Brussels
A former Citroen auto-assembly plant is set to become Europe’s newest outpost of modern and contemporary art: Kanal-Pompidou. The 40,000sqm complex will open with 10 exhibitions, including 350 pieces by artists including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian on loan from the original Centre Pompidou in Paris – which is closed until 2030 for renovations.
The building is an excellent example of adaptive reuse of older buildings, a practice applauded by Betsky, who admires it as an example of industrial Art Deco. “It’s a structure that starts out with a great building.”
Betsky says the images he has seen of the reimagined five-storey 1930s factory look promising. “It’s going to be a very light and airy space that will really do justice to the building’s heritage,” he said. “The Industrial Revolution left us with these great monuments, the equivalent to our cathedral and castles.”
The museum, which is set to open in November, is part of a planned cultural district, and will include a playground, public library, bakery and rooftop restaurant. Other opening exhibits will touch on the colonial exploitation of African women, along with a performance area and large industrial spaces for monumental art works.
Also new in Belgium: The storybook medieval town of Bruges welcomes Brusk, a massive glimmering glass exhibition hall that debuts with a show of immersive AI-driven sculptures.
AlamyIslamic Civilization Center, Tashkent
Once a Silk Road hub and centre of learning, Tashkent plans to put itself on the map again this year with the highly anticipated March opening of a grand museum complex known as the Islamic Civilization Center. The building itself is a stunner, topped with a monumental turquoise mosaic dome dominating the city’s skyline.
Located in the heart of the capital city, the museum centres on Qur’an Hall, which is expected to display the famed 7th-Century Qur’an of Uthman, one of the oldest examples of the ancient text in existence and included on Unesco’s Memory of the World Register. The centre’s collection also includes more than 2,000 manuscripts and historical items, many returned to the country in recent years after they were purchased at auction houses and sales.
An education area will include VR- and AI-enhanced exhibits highlighting Uzbekistan’s history from the pre-Islamic period to the present. One section allows guests to converse with historical scholars and experts via so-called “living portraits”. Other parts of the centre include a 200,000-volume library, the country’s first dedicated children’s museum, crafts workshops and a restoration laboratory.
“The Centre is already taking its place as a magnet for tourists and scholars alike,” said S Frederick Starr, author of the book Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age, which has been translated into 24 languages. Starr says the complex will introduce visitors to “the flowering in intellectual and artistic activity [that arose in this region] a millennium ago”.
Also new in Tashkent: The Centre for Contemporary Arts, one of the first large-scale museums devoted to modern art in Central Asia. It’s located in a 1912 industrial building that was originally a diesel station and tram depot
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