Reims rebuilt itself twice, and the seams show: a Baroque Jesuit library, Art Nouveau interiors, a Foujita-frescoed chapel and a concrete garden city all sit within a few kilometres. Three days here trace that rebuilding through its art.
Baroque college founded in 1606, entered by a trompe-l'œil staircase. The 18th-century library keeps 40,000 volumes behind carved oak panelling, and the refectory vault runs the full length of the wing. Guided visits only.
Reims' 1928 library was paid for by Andrew Carnegie's foundation as war reparation. The reading room mixes marble, mosaic and a Jacques Simon stained-glass window; the wrought-iron stair rail and original oak desks survive intact.
Art Nouveau villa built 1904-1908 on the Pommery estate, left derelict for decades and restored by Vranken. Louis Majorelle ironwork, Jacques Gruber glass and Gallé-school furniture fill seven rooms; the route ends in the winter garden.
Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita designed and frescoed this small chapel in 1965-66 after a vision in the Basilique Saint-Rémi. He painted 200 square metres of wall himself at 79, in a Romanesque shell fitted with his own stained glass.
Housed in the royal abbey's 17th-century monastic buildings, with a Renaissance staircase and 16th-century tapestries of Saint Remi's life. Rooms run from Gallo-Roman Durocortorum finds to regional military history across two floors.
Émile Maigrot's 1929 market hall, a 45-metre parabolic concrete vault engineered by Eugène Freyssinet and just 7 cm thick. Closed in 1988, saved from demolition and reopened in 2012; stalls run Wednesday, Friday and Saturday mornings.
A 13th-century merchant house rebuilt in Renaissance style, saved by collector Hugues Krafft, who left it with his furniture and his Dürer engravings — the complete Apocalypse and Great Passion series. Timbered façade, walled garden behind.
Italian-style horseshoe theatre of 1873, rebuilt after the 1918 shelling with an Art Deco ceiling and around 800 seats over four tiers. The season mixes opera, ballet and symphonic evenings; the foyer keeps its 1930s glasswork.
The regional contemporary art collection shows in Le Cellier, a 1920s champagne warehouse on rue de Mars with raw concrete bays. Three or four exhibitions a year, drawn from a holding of around a thousand works by artists such as Daniel Buren.
A semi-buried Gallo-Roman gallery from around 200 AD, the cryptoporticus of Durocortorum's forum — the vaulted storage arcade that ran beneath the square. Open summer afternoons only; the arcaded place du Forum sits directly above it.
Garden city built 1920-30 by the Foyer Rémois to rehouse bombed-out families: 617 brick houses, a communal hall and Église Saint-Nicaise, whose Maurice Denis mosaics and René Lalique glass sit inside a bare concrete shell.
A converted cardboard factory east of the centre, now the city's main live music room — 1,200 capacity in the main hall, around 300 in the club — with rock, rap and electronic bookings most Thursday to Saturday nights.