The continent's headline monuments deserve their fame, but they can crowd out quieter buildings that are just as rewarding to see and, often, far less busy. The five below are all real, well-documented works of architecture that tend to sit lower on the average itinerary — the sort of places you might walk past without quite realising what you were looking at. Each rewards a deliberate detour, and together they show how varied European building has been across the centuries.
Five to seek out
1. Hundertwasserhaus, Vienna, Austria
A social-housing block completed in the mid-1980s to designs by the artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, and unlike almost anything else in the city. It is known for its undulating floors, irregular windows, brightly coloured façade and the trees planted into its structure. It remains a residential building, so you admire it from the street, but the exterior alone rewards the short trip out from the centre. A small visitor complex opposite gives a little more context on the ideas behind it.
2. Casa Batlló, Barcelona, Spain
Antoni Gaudí's early-20th-century reworking of an ordinary apartment building, with its rippling stone façade, bone-like balconies, mosaic-tiled surfaces and a roofline often said to evoke a dragon's back. It is frequently overshadowed by the nearby Sagrada Família, yet it is a compact masterclass in Gaudí's organic style and one of several of his works recognised for their cultural importance.
3. Atomium, Brussels, Belgium
Built for the 1958 World's Fair, this giant model of an iron crystal — nine gleaming metal spheres linked by tubes — was only ever meant to be temporary. It survived, was later renovated, and now stands as one of the most distinctive structures in the Belgian capital, part sculpture and part building.
4. Pavilion of Portugal, Lisbon, Portugal
Designed by the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza Vieira for Expo '98, this modernist pavilion is best known for its extraordinary canopy: a vast, remarkably thin concrete "sail" that appears to drape gently between two porticoes, seemingly defying its own considerable weight. It sits in the redeveloped Parque das Nações district by the river.
5. Stari Most, Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina
A single-arch Ottoman-era bridge over the Neretva river, rebuilt after wartime destruction in a form faithful to its 16th-century original. Its graceful span and the restored old town around it make it one of the most recognisable sights in the region, and a moving example of careful reconstruction.
How to see them
None of these five needs to anchor a whole trip; each works better as a considered detour from the main sights of its city. Read a little about the ideas behind a building before you go and it changes how you look at it — Hundertwasser's rejection of straight lines, or Siza's fascination with structure, are as much part of the experience as the façade itself. Approaching on foot, and giving yourself time to walk right around a building rather than snapping it and moving on, is usually the most rewarding way to appreciate architecture of this kind.
Good to know
Some of these you can enter and some you can only view from the outside, and access arrangements differ from place to place. Where a building — like the Hundertwasserhaus — is still someone's home, keep a respectful distance and admire it from the street. Because opening arrangements, ticketing and occasional restoration works all change over time, check current details before you travel.