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With an eye-catchingly angular design by Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, the Aga Khan Museum made a splash when it opened in Toronto last fall. Dedicated to traditional Islamic arts and crafts, the cultural center—founded by the Aga Khan, a Muslim spiritual leader—is clad in luminous white Brazilian granite.

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New York firm Ennead Architects created Stanford University’s Anderson Gallery, a new exhibition space for 20th-century American art at the Palo Alto, California, school. Its simple rectilinear shape and rugged glass-reinforced-concrete façade strike a brilliant balance between utility and beauty.

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For the Arquipelago Contemporary Arts Center in Ribeira Grande, Portugal, two local firms, Menos é Mais Arquitectos and João Mendes Ribeiro Arquitecto, collaborated to connect several existing stone buildings in a disused warehouse complex. The team devised a pair of concrete structures, one painted white and one left unfinished to expose its handsome basalt face.

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A white metal façade marked by hundreds of hole-punch-like perforations denotes the new wing of the Fine Arts Museum in Badajoz, Spain, designed by Madrid’s Estudio Arquitectura Hago.

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Visitors to the Denmark’s Moesgaard Museum’s new wing by Henning Larsen Architects can take a stroll on its green roof. The building’s partially subterranean design is fitting for a structure housing the institution’s prehistoric artifacts, and complements the main exhibition hall, the grand manor seen at right.

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Built on a wedge-shaped site at the meeting of the Rhône and Saône rivers in Lyon, France, the Musée des Confluences —by avant-garde Austrian architecture firm Coop Himmelb(l)au—features a striking faceted-metal exterior.

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Blink and you’ll miss the discreet work done at the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis by Hans van Heeswijk Architects. The Dutch firm linked the institution’s 17th-century manor (seen at left) to a new gallery in a nearby Art Deco building via an underground passageway.

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At the Whitworth Gallery at Manchester University in England, the London architecture firm MUMA created two extensions (in glass and stainless steel, and in brick, respectively) to the original 19th-century buildings. The redbrick structure, seen here, is crowned by a glass volume that glows lanternlike at night.

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For Science Hills Komatsu, a science museum in the Japanese city, Mari Ito of Tokyo-based Urban Architecture Office created a series of connected knoll-like gallery spaces crowned with planted roofs.

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Opening late last year, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, boasts a new visitor’s center (pictured) by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Tadao Ando’s firm, with Gensler. Its 1955 main building (not shown) received a well-regarded renovation from New York–based AD100 architect Annabelle Selldorf.