"The world's top twelve modern buildings ..."

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Which is the world's most famous modern building? I have a strong suspicion that a global poll might well choose the Empire State Building. It's not just that the soaring Art Deco skyscraper was for decades the tallest structure on Earth, or that it has featured in countless photographs, newsreels and feature films (including, of course King Kong). It was, and remains, a magnificent successor to a line of monumentally aspiring buildings that takes us back to the very first great works of architecture.
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don't think our Magnificent Dozen could ever have excluded Sydney Opera House. Like the Empire State Building, Jorn Utzon's stirring design is the defining building of the city it rises from. In fact, Sydney Opera house redefined the way we saw and thought about its host city. Daring, complex, playful and superbly sited, here is one of those buildings visitors are drawn to as if magnetically.

Sydney Opera House spawned Frank Gehry's sensational Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Clad in titanium, this architectural waltz shimmers at every gridded street junction as you walk from the docks to the old heart of the Basque capital. Critics say that the Guggenheim is not 100 per cent practical for staging exhibitions. But here, for better or worse, the building is the star: the Bilbao Guggenheim is a glorious exhibition of itself, an architectural gesture, and urban eye-catcher that has truly transformed the way the world sees Bilbao and Bilbao sees itself.

The Pompidou Centre did something of the same for Paris. It made the city seem instantly modern. Truly revolutionary, this architectural coup de theâtre remains a surprise to look at and, celebrating its thirtieth birthday this year, is more popular than ever.

One of the most numinous of all modern places of worship of whatever creed is the pilgrimage chapel designed by Le Corbusier, set on a hilltop at Ronchamp in the Haute-Saone. This had to be on our list. So, too, Daniel Libeskind's haunting Jewish Museum in Berlin, a building that was most effective when newly complete and empty. During the lull between the museum's completion and the installation of a permanent exhibition inside its zig-zag, zinc-clad walls, people from all over the world queued to tour the empty shell. Theirs was a deeply moving experience in the grip of this powerful modern labyrinth.

We had to have a building by Frank Lloyd Wright, the greatest US architect of the last hundred years, and what Modern house is more compelling than Fallingwater? Foster's 30 St Mary Axe, or the "Gherkin", is one of the most charismatic of contemporary city towers. Gaudi's Casa Mila in Barcelona remains a city block like no other, a magnificent example of seemingly willful organic design that, nevertheless, fits beautifully into the streetscape of the great Catalan city. Grimshaw's Eden Centre, rising like a sea of bubbles from old Cornish chalk pits, is a dazzling example of lightweight hi-tech design, and yet another ultra-modern building that had done much to revive the fortunes of its locale. Zaha Hadid's Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg is a sci-fi blast, a wonderfully confident structure in which floors become walls, walls become floors and the world suddenly seems like a movie-set come to life, and very enjoyably so.

That's eleven. Our twelfth, which is very much mine, is nothing more and nothing less than a London Underground tube station. Arnos Grove, designed by Charles Holden for Frank Pick, chief executive of the London Passenger Transport Board, is a truly ennobling, if modest public building. Look at it afresh. Here is a utilitarian construction that is, nevertheless a Roman civic temple brought up-to-date, a knowing reference to some of the greatest European public buildings of its era - most notably Gunnar Asplund's Stockholm City Library - as well as a superbly functional railway station and, above all, a work of civic art that lifts the mundane into a noble architectural spirit. Some tube station. I wonder if commuters using it day-to-day feel the same way?