When you think of visiting a museum, you are probably thinking about a serious and prestigious establishment in a beautiful building, a Tate, Louvre or Uffizi. However, there are all sorts of bizarre museums in the world worth visiting just for sheer novelty alone. Whether it is their odd architecture, strange subject matter, or the fact that they are totally underwater, here are the 10 most unusual and bizarre museums around the world worth visiting.
Perhaps the only museum in the world that you need scuba gear to enter, Museo Subacuatico de Arte is a submerged sculptural extravaganza found in one of the world’s clearest bodies of water, the Mexican National Marine Park in the Caribbean. Visitors to this aquatic art gallery can expect to find more than 400 sculptures, depicting residents and even some celebrities of Cancun, Playa del Carmen and Puerto Juarez, amongst many other sights ranging from nine to 20 feet underwater. What is more, all of the sculptures are made of special marine-friendly materials, meaning that eventually this attraction will become its own stunning coral reef.
MUSA, Kukulcan Km. Boulevard, Cancun, Mexico +52 1 998 227 1218
Some people say ‘friendly alien’, others say mutant organ (and those are the polite critics), call it what you want. Whatever you think it looks like, the Kunsthaus in Graz, Austria has to be one of the weirdest-looking buildings in the world generally, so had to feature in any list of odd museums. Built to commemorate Graz’s year as a European Capital of Culture, it could not be more out of sync with its surroundings, like it is a very different species from the brick around it, from a planet far from Western Europe.
Kunsthaus Graz, 1 Lendkai, Graz, Austria +43 316 8017 9200
If you have ever wondered to yourself, ‘I wonder what it would look like if a late Matisse cut-out and a Mondrian were flung together in the Large Hadron Collider and the ensuing colorful rubble was then turned into a building’, then look no further than Panama’s BioMuseo for an answer. A pinnacle of architect Frank Gehry’s late deconstruction period, the look of the place is as stunning as it is weird, showing fittingly bright colors for a museum dedicated to biodiversity. Panamanian authorities hope that this quirky museum (with collections mostly provided by the Smithsonian) will do for them what the Guggenheim did for Bilbao.
Technically an information center rather than a museum proper, the architecture of this building is so bizarre it blows proper reasoning out the window. As the name suggests, the long building is shaped on the one side like a sheep, and on the other as a dog, with neither end having any real rhyme or reason. Apparently an example of ‘mimetic architecture’, when it comes to New Zealand landmarks, this one is a lot more representation of the folky novelty ‘Flight of the Conchords’ than the epic, overblown beauty of the ‘Lord of the Rings’ series.
Sheep and Dog Building (Tirau i-SITE Visitor Information Centre), 65 Main Road, Tirau, New Zealand +64 7 883 1202
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