When museums become destinations: The spectacular new cultural landmarks worth travelling for

For generations, museums occupied a familiar place in the traveller’s itinerary. One visited the city first and fitted the museum somewhere between its monuments, markets and restaurants. In 2026, that relationship increasingly appears to be reversing. Across major cities, new and dramatically expanded museums are arriving as destinations in their own right — buildings conceived not merely to contain collections, but to provide experiences powerful enough to influence where people travel.

Los Angeles offers perhaps the clearest example. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which opened to the public on September 22, is difficult to regard simply as another stop on a Los Angeles sightseeing list. Founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, its 300,000-square-foot building rises from Exposition Park in a futuristic form designed by Ma Yansong of MAD. Around it is a newly created 13-acre landscape, while inside more than 30 galleries occupy about 100,000 square feet. The opening displays bring together more than 1,300 works and examine visual storytelling across cultures and centuries.

A journey through stories

The proposition is unusually broad. Visitors encounter illustration, painting, comics, murals and cinema rather than a collection restricted by conventional distinctions between popular culture and fine art. The museum’s holdings exceed 40,000 works, while its galleries explore subjects as universal as family, love, work, play, adventure and fantasy.

That breadth matters from a travel perspective. A museum associated with the creator of Star Wars might naturally attract film enthusiasts, but the institution has deliberately positioned itself beyond memorabilia. It places cinematic objects within a much longer history of humans telling stories through images. The result is the sort of cultural attraction capable of becoming the centrepiece of a day rather than a two-hour diversion.

Its architecture reinforces that change. Contemporary museum design increasingly begins outside the gallery. Gardens, restaurants, public spaces, libraries, cinemas and performance venues extend the experience, encouraging visitors to linger rather than simply work their way through rooms of objects.

East London gets cultural

Across the Atlantic, London has used a different model to redraw its cultural map. The V&A East Museum, opened on April 18 at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, has taken the Victoria and Albert Museum far beyond its famous South Kensington home. Admission to the permanent galleries is free, and the museum stays open until 10 pm on Thursdays and Saturdays.

The location is as significant as the collection. Travellers accustomed to associating London's major museums with South Kensington, Bloomsbury or Trafalgar Square now have another reason to head east. V&A East sits within the East Bank cultural quarter, itself part of the continuing transformation of the former Olympic landscape.

Inside, its permanent Why We Make galleries bring together more than 500 objects spanning art, fashion, architecture, performance and design. The museum was also shaped with input from young people, creatives and communities in East London.

Nearby, V&A East Storehouse offers another unconventional museum experience. Rather than hiding most of a vast collection behind closed doors, it invites visitors into spaces holding more than half a million works. The distinction between gallery, archive and behind-the-scenes encounter consequently becomes less rigid.

New York builds outward

In New York, meanwhile, the New Museum demonstrates what happens when an established institution uses architecture to alter its relationship with its neighbourhood.

Its expanded Lower East Side campus opened in March, nearly doubling the museum’s footprint to around 120,000 square feet. Designed by OMA, the addition brought new galleries, studios, performance areas and public spaces alongside the institution’s existing Bowery building.

That matters because contemporary museums are increasingly competing not only for attention but for time. Travellers have endless ways to spend a day in New York. A cultural institution therefore has to offer something beyond a succession of white-walled galleries. Restaurants, public art, performance, architecture and neighbourhood connections turn a museum visit into a more expansive urban experience.

The New Museum also illustrates how the building itself has become part of the cultural encounter. Visitors arrive not merely to see what hangs inside but to experience how old and new architecture meet on a dense Lower Manhattan street.

China makes architecture an exhibit

Perhaps nowhere is the convergence of museum architecture and destination-making more visible than in China.

The Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art, which fully opened in August beside Jinji Lake, consists of nine silver-white buildings connected by a flowing, ribbon-like roof. The design encourages movement through the complex in a manner compared by local authorities to wandering through one of Suzhou's classical gardens.

That idea is particularly appropriate for a city renowned for historic gardens. Rather than attempting to compete with Suzhou's heritage, the new museum translates something of the city's spatial character into contemporary architecture. Designed by BIG, the complex covers roughly 59,500 square metres and combines exhibition areas with education, theatre and commercial spaces.

For travellers, the contrast creates the attraction: ancient garden traditions and an ambitious contemporary cultural building can form parts of the same journey.

Beijing is taking the experiential idea in another direction. On September 30, the Beijing Future Science and Technology Museum is scheduled to open in Beijing Expo Park. Its 13,000 square metres of exhibition space will contain 214 exhibits across five halls devoted to subjects ranging from the Earth and fundamental science to the digital age, space and emerging technologies.

Its most immediately travel-friendly attraction may be an immersive area simulating low gravity. Hands-on laboratories and interdisciplinary programmes further move the institution away from the traditional idea of visitors silently looking at objects behind glass.

The building as attraction

None of this is entirely new. Bilbao famously demonstrated decades ago that a museum could transform perceptions of a destination. What has changed is how widely the principle has spread.

A spectacular building alone is no longer enough. The emerging museum destination combines architecture with food, landscapes, performances, immersive technology, public spaces and programming. Visitors are being encouraged to experience the institution at several levels: look at art, walk through architecture, eat, watch a film, attend an event or simply spend time outside.

That shift also changes travel geography within cities. V&A East draws visitors towards Stratford. The Lucas Museum adds another major cultural institution to Los Angeles's Exposition Park. Suzhou's new museum creates a contemporary counterpoint beside Jinji Lake. Museums can therefore lead travellers into neighbourhoods they might otherwise have bypassed.

And there are more such journeys ahead. Brussels' KANAL, occupying a former Citroën factory, and the relocated Memphis Art Museum are among significant museum projects scheduled to open later in 2026.

The most interesting question for travellers, then, may no longer be which museum should I visit while I am there?

Increasingly, it is becoming: which city should I visit because of its museum?