Getty Center

The visit to the Getty Center begins with a tram ride, a three-car cable system that takes you from the street-level parking garage up to the main campus on its hilltop perch in the Santa Monica Mountains. Once there, you’ll find a sprawling complex of low-rise buildings, not a single monolithic museum. Architect Richard Meier’s design uses 1.2 million square feet of rough-cleft Italian travertine – look closely and you can see fossilized leaves and branches in the stone – set against curvilinear forms clad in enameled aluminum panels. The campus is arranged around a central plaza, with the museum itself broken into several smaller pavilions connected by glass-enclosed bridges and open-air loggias. The whole layout encourages movement between the galleries and the various courtyards and sculpture terraces, with panoramic views of the Los Angeles area appearing at almost every turn. Meier’s design makes heavy use of natural light, which floods the circular foyer and filters into the galleries through carefully placed skylights. The museum’s collection focuses on pre-20th-century European art, with paintings, sculpture, and illuminated manuscripts organized chronologically across four main pavilions. You’ll find works like Vincent van Gogh’s "Irises" here, alongside a significant collection of 19th and 20th-century photography. But the art is only part of the story. The 134,000-square-foot Central Garden, a living sculpture designed by artist Robert Irwin, is a destination in its own right. Admission is free, but you need to book a timed-entry reservation in advance. Because the complex is so massive, most people spend several hours here, treating the architecture and gardens with the same attention as the galleries inside.