Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb

For fifty-five years Zagreb's contemporary collection had no permanent display, because the Kulmer Palace in the upper town could not hold one. In 1998 the city and the Ministry of Culture decided to build across the river in Novi Zagreb, on the corner of Dubrovnik and Većeslav Holjevac avenues, and Igor Franić won the competition against eighty-four other entries. The building he delivered is deliberately undramatic from outside: a long glazed and metal-clad volume held above the ground on thin columns, leaving the site open underneath so that the museum does not close off the block. The cornerstone went down in November 2003 and the museum opened on 11 December 2009 after six years of delays, at more than twice the budgeted cost. Of its 14,600 square metres, 3,500 are given to the permanent collection and about 1,500 to temporary exhibitions, the remainder taken up by a library, a multimedia hall, a bookshop and the circulation threading them together.