Explore Houston

The Rothko Chapel is a non-denominational chapel in the Montrose neighbourhood of Houston, founded by John and Dominique de Menil and completed in 1971. Its octagonal brick interior holds fourteen dark paintings by Mark Rothko. In front stands Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk in a reflecting pool dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr.

The Menil Collection is an art museum in Houston's Montrose neighbourhood, built for the collection of John and Dominique de Menil. Its main building by Renzo Piano opened in 1987. The 30-acre campus also holds the Cy Twombly Gallery, the Menil Drawing Institute and a Dan Flavin installation, with works from antiquity to modern art.

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is a non-collecting museum in the Museum District, founded in 1948 to show the art of its own time. Since 1972 it has occupied a building by Gunnar Birkerts clad in corrugated steel, on Montrose Boulevard. Its two galleries host changing exhibitions of contemporary artists, together with talks and education programmes.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in the Museum District, opened its first building, a neoclassical design by William Ward Watkin, in 1924, making it the oldest art museum in Texas. Its collection of nearly 80,000 works spans more than 5,000 years and is shown in the Law, Beck and Kinder buildings, with wings by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and a sculpture garden.

Holocaust Museum Houston is a museum in Houston's Museum District, opened in 1996 and enlarged in 2019, that documents the Holocaust and other genocides. Its permanent galleries tell the history through survivors' testimony and objects, among them a railcar of the type used for deportations and the Danish rescue boat Hanne Frank. All exhibits are in English and Spanish.

Children's Museum Houston is a hands-on museum for children up to 12 and their families in the Museum District, founded in 1980. Its building on Binz Street, designed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, opened in 1992. Exhibits on science, engineering, money and the natural world are bilingual in English and Spanish.

The Houston Museum of Natural Science, founded in 1909, has been on the northern edge of Hermann Park since its present building was completed in 1969. Four floors of halls cover dinosaurs and fossils, gems and minerals, energy and ancient cultures, and the complex also holds the Burke Baker Planetarium, the Cockrell Butterfly Center and a giant-screen theatre.

Lakewood Church is an evangelical megachurch in Houston's Greenway Plaza, founded by John and Dodie Osteen in 1959 and led by Joel and Victoria Osteen. Since 2005 it has met in the former Compaq Center, the arena where the Houston Rockets once played, rebuilt as a sanctuary of about 16,800 seats with services in English and Spanish.