Museum

With a recent addition, Seattle Art Museum has effectively tripled its exhibition space and increased the size of its permanent collection by 1,000 pieces. The original Robert Venturi-designed museum is now the back door to Brad Cloepfil's enormous new space -- and while the new SAM may look anonymous, even cold from the street, inside it's a different story. Natural light pours into airy spaces (adjustable shades on the building's façade protect the art from UV damage), and high ceilings give the art room to breathe.

And there's an awful lot of art to fill those new walls. You'll find Japanese pop art by the likes of Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami; abstracts by Marcel Duchamp and Ellsworth Kelly; classic European works by Paolo Uccello and Peter Paul Rubens; and awe-inspiring pieces by Constantin Brancusi and Cai Guo-Qiang, whose "Inopportune: Stage One" -- a series of tumbling, "exploding" cars -- is as playful as it is iconic. SAM's collection of Asian, African, Mesoamerican and Northwest art remains without peer, and those who go to art museums expecting to see big names -- Botticelli, Pollock, Arbus -- will not be disappointed. This is a proper big-city museum, perfect for a forward-looking metropolis.