Düsseldorf punches far above its 645,000 residents: Beuys and the Bechers taught here, Kraftwerk invented electronic pop here, and the K20/K21 pairing rivals any German collection. Add Gehry's Medienhafen and Japan's largest German community.
Curved black Norwegian-granite façade holding 100+ Paul Klee works bought in 1960 to found the collection, plus Picasso, Beuys and Richter. Tue-Fri 10-18, Sat/Sun 11-18, closed Monday. First Sunday of the month is free entry.
Brutalist 1967 concrete block facing K20 across Grabbeplatz, deliberately hostile-looking and beloved for it. Rotating contemporary shows only, no permanent collection; the ground-floor Kunstverein runs a separate radical programme. Tue-Sun 11-18.
The academy where Beuys taught until his 1972 dismissal and where Bernd and Hilla Becher trained Gursky, Struth, Ruff and Höfer into the Düsseldorf School of Photography. The 1879 neo-Renaissance building is closed to casual visitors outside the January Rundgang.
Three warped towers from 1999 in white plaster, red brick and mirrored steel, standing where the harbour's cargo cranes once worked. Surrounding blocks add Chipperfield, Fuksas and Kaufmann to the ensemble — Germany's densest starchitect quarter.
The 1880 Rhineland parliament rebuilt as a 21st-century art house, crowned by Tomás Saraceno's In Orbit — a steel web 25m above the glass dome you can climb onto in a jumpsuit. Tue-Fri 10-18, weekends 11-18.
The world's principal archive of Düsseldorf's exiled poet, holding manuscripts, his death mask and the Buch der Lieder editions. A quiet Baroque townhouse a few streets from Heine's birthplace at Bolkerstraße 53. Tue-Sun 11-17.
Germany's only museum devoted entirely to ceramics: 8,000 years across 20,000 objects, from Islamic lustreware to a reconstructed 18th-century Delft-tiled room, housed in the Baroque Palais Nesselrode. Tue-Sun 11-17, Wed to 21.
The Rhine's shared opera house, splitting productions with Duisburg and home to the Ballett am Rhein, long shaped by Martin Schläpfer's choreography. The 1956 auditorium seats 1,342 behind a plain post-war façade.
A full Jodo-Shinshu temple with a wooden hondo, Japanese garden and tea house, built in 1993 for the 8,000-strong Japanese community. Left-bank suburb reached on tram 705. Tue-Sun 13-17, garden access included.
Two blocks behind the Hauptbahnhof holding Takagi bakery, the Japanese bookshop OCS and a dozen ramen and izakaya counters serving the largest Japanese business community in mainland Europe. Busiest at lunch when Japanese office workers queue.
Karl-Heinrich Müller's art-in-parallel-with-nature experiment: windowless brick pavilions by Erwin Heerich scattered across 62 hectares of meadow, holding Rembrandt drawings, Khmer sculpture and Gotthard Graubner colour fields, unlabelled and unguarded. Bus 869 from Neuss.
The unmarked backstreet block where Kraftwerk built the Kling Klang studio in 1970 and recorded Autobahn and Trans-Europe Express. No plaque, no tours — just an industrial doorway that changed pop music, near the Hauptbahnhof's south side.