The World’s Most Beautiful Museum
Overlooking Norway’s southern coastline, the Kunstsilo in Kristiansand has been awarded the World Title for Museums at the prestigious Prix Versailles 2025.
Originally built in the 1930s as a grain silo on Kristiansand’s waterfront, the structure has been reborn as a museum, and now, officially, the most beautiful museum in the world. Named Kunstsilo, the project won the Prix Versailles 2025 award for Museum of the Year. Designed by Mestres Wåge Arquitectes, BAX, and Mendoza Partida, the transformation turns an industrial relic into a powerful cultural engine. At its center is a vast sculpted void, created by hollowing out the silo’s cylindrical forms, which has become the dramatic core of the visitor experience.
Opened in 2024, Kunstsilo is conceived as a dynamic cultural hub rather than a monumental institution. Alongside exhibitions, it hosts public programs and activities designed for diverse audiences, embracing the idea of a museum as a living, evolving space. 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 architectural projects and adaptive reuse interventions that combine design excellence, contextual sensitivity, and sustainability. This year’s edition recognized 72 projects across multiple categories worldwide.
In the same category, the Special Prize for Interiors was awarded to the Audeum Audio Museum in Seoul, a private institution dedicated to sound and audio technologies, designed by Kengo Kuma with contributions from Kenya Hara. The building stands out for its façade of 20,000 vertically arranged aluminum tubes, an urban filter that translates the idea of resonance into architectural form and introduces a multisensory journey extending beyond vision alone.
The Special Prize for Exteriors went to the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, for the Rhonda & Howard Hawks Pavilion by Snøhetta, a luminous extension that seamlessly connects the original 1931 Art Deco building with the 1994 addition by Norman Foster, redefining the museum campus as a unified whole.
The World’s Most Beautiful Museums selection also includes the Grand Palais in Paris, the Saka Museum in Bali, the Diriyah Art Futures in Riyadh, and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Cleveland.
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