The Jewish Museum in Berlin, by Daniel Libeskind, tackles the emptiness left by the extermination of Europe's Jews during the Second World War. His response is an architecture of absence.

At the end of the 19th century, Louis Henry Sullivan, the father of American architecture, built the world's largest opera house, a "democratic" auditorium which was revolutionary in its very conception.

In 1928, Pierre Chareau built the poetic and remarkable Maison de Verre, one of the unique buildings of the 20th century. Inserted into an existing building, the views dissolve through semi-transparent materials, juxtaposing metal and glass, almost taking it into the realms of Surrealism.

Built in 1050, the Abbey is one of the foremost pilgrim churches of the Christian world. Rational, svelte and light-filled Romanesque architecture that flies in the face of cliches.

The visionary architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux, one of the earliest exponents of French Neoclassical design, built a monumental factory for the king of France at the end of the 18th century. It is pragmatic and utopian, an aesthetic revolution.

In 1953, while going through his worst life-crisis, French designer Jean Prouvé built "his" house. Designed in haste, it embodies his most innovative ideas.

In the most ambitious of the Mussolini regime's buildings, the leader of Italy's modern movement Adalberto Libera attempted the impossible combination of fascism with modernity. It reflects Libera's great ability to design ambiguously in a space, metaphysical language that sits on a knife-edge between modernism and neo-classicism.

The Menier factory at Noisiel, outside Paris, was the largest chocolate factory in the world between 1870 and 1914. Throughout its three successive states, it tells the story of a veritable laboratory of industrial architecture in the second half of the 19th century.

Vauban's "Queen of the citadels" was the model for military construction all over France. Built between 1668 and 1671, its exacting and simple design has made it a source of inspiration for major contemporary architects.

La Sante prison (1861-1867) is a unique and impressive work of architecture. At the cutting edge of reflections on imprisonment, it was at the time the ultimate "modern prison", the stone embodiment of 19th century penitentiary obsessions.