Cite de l'Ocean et du Surf

If you think this building looks like a wave, you're right. New York architect Steven Holl won the international competition for this museum in two thousand and five with a concept he called under the sky, under the sea. The concave roof creates the outdoor plaza you might be standing on right now. The convex floor creates the exhibition spaces below. The whole building is essentially an inverted landscape. You walk on the roof.

Holl designed it with collaborator Solange Fabiao, and it opened in June two thousand and eleven. The roof slopes toward the ocean and is paved in Portuguese cobblestone. Two glass boulders sit on the surface, one containing a restaurant and the other a surfer kiosk. They're designed to echo the natural boulders on the nearby beach. From the air, the whole structure looks like a sculpted wave frozen in concrete and glass.

The building won the twenty eleven Emirates Glass LEAF Award and the twenty twelve American Architecture Award. It's one of those structures that divides opinion sharply. Some people find it brilliant. Others think it looks like a skate park designed by aliens. Either way, it's a bold piece of architecture for a town that mostly trades on Belle Epoque charm.

Inside, the exhibitions focus on ocean science and surf culture. The museum explores everything from deep-sea ecosystems to wave mechanics to the physics of surfing. It's hands-on and designed to work for all ages, though the building itself is probably more interesting than any single exhibit.

What makes this place genuinely unusual is the ambition. A small Basque surf town hired one of the world's most celebrated architects to build a museum about the ocean. And he designed a building that IS the ocean. It's a statement about what Biarritz thinks it deserves.