Single places worth the journey, in towns and landscapes that don't need a city guide.
Robert Smithson's 1,500-foot coil of black basalt and earth, built into the Great Salt Lake in 1970. Depending on the water, it is submerged, crusted with white salt, or ringed with pink.
A small town in the Texas desert where Donald Judd installed his work permanently, at the Chinati Foundation.
Edward James, the English poet and patron of the Surrealists, spent his last decades building concrete columns, stairways to nowhere and flower-shaped towers in the jungle around his orchid garden.
Walter De Maria's grid of 400 polished steel poles in the New Mexico high desert (1977). You can only see it by spending the night in the cabin beside it, from May to October.
The remains of a Haida village on a remote island, its carved mortuary and memorial poles left to return to the forest, as the Haida intend. Haida Watchmen guide visitors.
Frank Lloyd Wright's house for the Kaufmann family, cantilevered over a waterfall in the Pennsylvania woods, built from 1936. By guided tour, booked ahead.
A 19th-century factory complex in the Berkshires turned into one of the largest contemporary art museums in the US, with long-term buildings for Sol LeWitt's wall drawings and Anselm Kiefer.
Alice Walton's museum of American art, free, in Moshe Safdie's pavilions built over two spring-fed ponds in an Ozark ravine (2011).
Leonard Knight spent nearly thirty years covering a hillside in adobe, straw and thousands of gallons of donated paint, with one message: God is love.
From 1989 until his death in 2004, the artist Noah Purifoy built about a hundred sculptures from junk across ten acres of the Mojave: scrap wood and metal, tyres, old appliances.
An island in the Seto Inland Sea turned into an art destination: the Benesse Art Site, and Tadao Ando's Chichu Art Museum, built into the hill around Monet, James Turrell and Walter De Maria.
Japan's first open-air museum (1969): about 120 sculptures across the hills, and a Picasso Pavilion with more than 300 works. Finish with the hot springs.
A rural postman, Ferdinand Cheval, spent 33 years building a dream palace from stones he picked up on his rounds. Nothing else looks like it.
A whole modernist city, planned in the 1950s, with Le Corbusier's Capitol Complex, now a UNESCO World Heritage site.
A vast botanical garden and contemporary art park near Belo Horizonte, with pavilions dedicated to single artists.
David Walsh's Museum of Old and New Art, dug into a cliff above the river in Hobart. Arrive by ferry.