Lausanne packs a national photography museum, Dubuffet's outsider-art collection and one of Europe's busiest opera houses into a city of 145,000. Three days follow the art downhill from Beaulieu to the lake.
Switzerland's oldest public art collection — 10,000 works from Vaud painters Ducros and Vallotton to Giacometti and Rebecca Horn — inside Barozzi Veiga's windowless brick monolith beside the rail tracks. Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00, Thu to 20:00.
Two museums stacked in one black-and-white concrete block by Aires Mateus: Photo Elysée below ground with 1.2 million negatives including the Chaplin and Sabine Weiss archives, mudac above for contemporary design and glass.
Jean Dubuffet's 1971 donation to the city: 70,000 works by psychiatric patients, mediums, prisoners and self-taught recluses, shown in the deliberately dimmed floors of the 18th-century Château de Beaulieu. Tue–Sun 11:00–18:00.
SANAA's 2010 single-storey wave — one continuous 20,000 m² concrete shell rippling over the campus library, with 14 patios punched through it and no interior walls. Free to walk through daily until 22:00 during term.
An 1850 merchant's country house on the hill above the city, hung two or three times a year with borrowed Impressionist and modern shows, plus a permanent core of Vallotton, Magritte and Degas and a park of 200-year-old cedars.
A Florentine-revival palace on Place de la Riponne holding four cantonal museums at once: zoology with its whale skeleton, geology, archaeology and history, plus monetary collections. Permanent displays are free.
One of the world's ten largest film archives, screening from its own 85,000-title vault in the Salle Paderewski and Cinématographe. Daily programmes mix restored silents with Swiss features, often in 35mm.
A 1871 Italian-style house rebuilt in 2012, running five or six full productions a season with its own chorus and the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne in the pit. Béjart Ballet Lausanne also dances here between Beaulieu runs.
Set in the former bishop's palace, built around a 1638 scale model of the city showing the rivers Flon and Louve before they were buried under today's streets. Strong on Lausanne's guilds, wine trade and 20th-century social life.
A former goods depot in the buried Flon valley, its warehouses now a grid of pastel-fronted blocks holding galleries, the Bleu Lézard crowd, skate ramps and the city's densest concentration of commissioned murals and paste-ups.
Built over the foundations of a Lousonna town house, showing mosaics, votive altars and everyday bronzes from the Roman port that preceded the hilltop city. The excavated forum and quarter lie in the lakeside park outside.
Lausanne's long-running punk and independent club, wedged into two stone arches beneath the Grand-Pont viaduct, run as an association since 1971 and still booking noise, garage and electronic acts four nights a week.