Galleries worth the detour.

A contemporary gallery inside a preserved sento in old Yanaka, tiled walls and high ceiling intact. The single best argument that a room's past can make the art better.

OMA turned a 1910s distillery into a campus of raw and gilded volumes, including a tower and a building clad entirely in gold leaf. Industrial bones, deliberately not smoothed over.

Vast free-entry halls housing Anselm Kiefer's permanent concrete towers. The scale is industrial because the building was, and nobody pretended otherwise.

On the Refshaleøen shipyard, showing the kind of room-scale installation art that only fits in a former industrial hall. Surrounded by the city's best new food and drink.

Five storeys of two-metre-thick concrete, later a fruit warehouse and then a techno club, now a collection viewable by advance guided tour only. Berlin's layered history in one structure.

The Mitte institution that helped define post-reunification Berlin art, still programming ahead of the market rather than behind it.

A Romanesque Revival schoolhouse in Long Island City, kept deliberately rougher than its Manhattan parent. Home of the Young Architects Program courtyard commissions.

Running since 1972 and still the reference for artist-led programming in New York — the antithesis of the blue-chip gallery model a few blocks away.

Europe's largest contemporary art centre, left intentionally raw — exposed concrete, stripped surfaces, late opening hours. Ambitious, uneven, never boring.

OMA inserted a glass-and-steel mobile tower into a 19th-century courtyard building, with floors that move to reconfigure the space. A production studio as much as a gallery.

A travertine block on stilts with a sawtooth roof, holding Latin America's most significant contemporary collection. Free or near-free, and next door to Museo Soumaya.

The gallery that internationalized Mexican contemporary art, in an Alberto Kalach building with a translucent roof. It operated nomadically for a decade before settling.

Studios, bars, and a hostel around a courtyard that functions as the social centre of young Tbilisi. The clearest example anywhere of reuse creating a scene rather than following one.

An Arts District complex of brick sheds and outdoor courtyards, with a bookshop and restaurant attached. Mega-gallery scale, but the building keeps it honest.

A mirrored bowl holding the museum's entire collection in public view — no curation, no narrative, just everything at once. A genuinely radical rethink of what a museum shows.

A wedge of rusted weathering steel in Southbank, programming Australian and international art with no permanent collection to protect.