'The architectural pivot around which Manhattan appears to turn' ... The Empire State Building. Photograph: Felix Clay  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.  In a sense, this hugely popular New York landmark, the architectural pivot around which Manhattan appears to turn, is a 20th-century successor to the ancient ziggurats that arose in Sumeria, between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, and marked the beginning of western civilisation and the city itself. Like those haunting brick structures, the Empire State Building, all steel, glass and granite, stretches up from the street, and our reach, to the heavens. Its reach, lit up beautifully at night, seems all but infinite. It is also a confidently realised and remarkably well-mannered conceit, and one that nearly eighty years after its completion attracts queues of visitors from around the world to ride its elevators and bestride its public viewing platforms. "Look at me, Ma!", it's hard not to think as your eyes command panoramas of Manhattan, and beyond, "I'm on top of the world."  When we decided to choose the world's top twelve modern buildings to publish as pull-outs from the Guardian and as interactive online guides, we had to be ruthless and partisan. We also wanted to show a spread of different types of buildings, from houses to places of work, enlightenment and worship, and to revel in the extraordinary range of styles that architecture has adopted worldwide since 1900.  I 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?  Arnos Grove station is not exactly the Empire State Building, and yet I like to think that Manhattan's magnificent tower would look down very respectfully at a work of architecture that, too, was designed not simply to please a wealthy elite, but as a modern fanfare for the common man.  · Jonathan Glancey is the Guardian's architecture critic.
A special Guardian series showcases the best modern architecture around the globe. Jonathan Glancey explains how the list was put together.