Cologne rebuilt itself twice and collects obsessively: the largest Pop Art holding in Europe, a Zumthor museum raised over ruins, some 400 concerts a year underground at the Philharmonie, and welded junk art in Ehrenfeld. Three days, nearly all of it within tram distance.
Three inverted-L Kranhäuser by BRT Architekten (2008-10) stand 62m over a restored 1898 harbour mole. A kilometre of quay runs past the brick Siebengebirge warehouse and the Bayenturm, open around the clock, free.
Peter Zumthor's 2007 building grows out of the bombed shell of St. Kolumba, its grey brick perforated to filter daylight over Roman foundations. The archdiocese hangs medieval reliquaries beside Richter and Rebecca Horn.
The largest Pop Art holding outside the United States sits beside a 900-work Picasso collection, Russian avant-garde rooms and the Agfa photography archive, all under Busmann + Haberer's zigzag zinc roof by the Rhine.
A privately funded four-hectare park north of the zoo rehangs itself every two years: around 30 large works by artists including Rosemarie Trockel and Thomas Schütte stand among the trees, admission free.
Cologne's oldest museum, in O.M. Ungers' austere 2001 stone cube, runs the medieval Cologne school through Rembrandt, Rubens and Leibl into a Corboud wing of some 170 French Impressionist and Pointillist canvases.
Wilhelm Riphahn's 1957 opera house is listed post-war modernism: staggered concrete drums, travertine cladding, a glass foyer meant to be read from the street. The Schauspiel Köln theatre shares the same square.
The applied arts museum lays out a continuous 20th-century design floor - Rietveld, Bauhaus and Werkbund furniture, Eames, Colani - above rooms of Jugendstil glass, medieval goldwork and historic poster graphics.
Busmann + Haberer buried a 2,000-seat vineyard-terrace hall beneath Heinrich-Böll-Platz in 1986. Roughly 400 events a year range from the resident Gürzenich Orchestra to jazz and contemporary programmes.
The Gestapo's Cologne headquarters kept ten cells in its cellar, where some 1,800 inscriptions scratched by prisoners survive on the plaster. Upstairs, permanent rooms document the city under National Socialism.
Streets named after Belgian cities hold Cologne's densest run of independent galleries, record shops and concept stores. On warm evenings the whole quarter drifts onto the church steps at Brüsseler Platz.
Kunio Maekawa's 1977 pavilion frames a courtyard pond designed by Masayuki Nagare. Inside are Japanese folding screens, Korean celadon and Chinese Buddhist bronzes - Germany's only museum devoted solely to East Asian art.
Odo Rumpf welds scrap steel into towers, machines and creatures across a fenced Ehrenfeld yard that doubles as a bar and concert space - the self-declared free state of Cologne's DIY art scene, with fire sculptures on event nights.