Paris to Berlin by train
933 miles, six days
Click the buttons below to view detailed maps for each day's itinerary.
All Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6Day 1: Paris
The first major museum building to open in the City of Light since the Pompidou Center in 1977, the (1) Quai Branly Museum (37 Quai Branly; 33-1/56-61-70-00; www.quaibranly.fr) is unlike any building Paris has seen before. Jean Nouvel's surprisingly daring design—brightly colored cantilevered cubes, façades covered in vegetation, all in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower—steals the show from the 3,500 tribal artifacts from Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas on display inside. Venture off the beaten path and explore the cultural buildings that put Nouvel on the map. The sleek (2) Cartier Foundation for contemporary art (261 Blvd. Raspail; 33-1/42-18-56-50; www.fondation.cartier.fr) hosts cutting-edge exhibitions such as Matthew Barney's Cremaster 4 in a sublime glass-enclosed building near Montparnasse. One of Nouvel's earliest buildings, the (3) Arab World Institute (1 Rue des Fossés-Saint-Bernard; 33-1/40-51-38-38; www.imarabe.org), has a façade of 240 moucharabies, or geometric screened windows, that open and close like camera lenses. The rooftop terrace and restaurant have terrific views of Paris.
Day 2: Paris to Luxembourg (3 hours)
At Gare de l'Est, hop a TGV train to Luxembourg—yes, Luxembourg—where I.M. Pei's latest building, the (4) Grand-Duc Jean Museum of Modern Art (3 Park Dräi Eechelen; 352-45/378-5960; www.mudam.lu) is helping the tiny country revamp its image as a boring enclave of bankers and Eurocrats. The prolific Parisian designers Erwan and Ronan Bouroullec created the museum's gift shop and café, which features a "sky" of fabric tiles above a pair of long wooden tables and a ficus garden. Across Place de l'Europe, check out the two-year-old home of the (5) Luxembourg Philharmonic, designed by Pritzker-winning French architect Christian de Portzamparc (1 Place de L'Europe; 352/260-2271; www.philharmonie.lu), where rings of columns enclosing the elliptical hall ebb and flow to suggest the changing tempo of music.
Day 3: Luxembourg to Rotterdam (4 hours) to Amsterdam (1 hours)
Rotterdam may not share Amsterdam's charms (it was all but leveled in World War II), but it's definitely the center of Dutch design culture, not to mention the home of Rem Koolhaas. Get your bearings with a visit to the (6) Netherlands Architecture Institute (25 Museumpark; 31-10/440-1200; www.nai.nl), a striking glass box created by Dutch architect Jo Coenen; it has one of the largest architectural collections in the world. Next door, the restored 1930's Sonneveld House (31-10/440-1200; reserve two weeks in advance for a guided tour), is one of the best-preserved examples of the Nieuwe Bouwen style, the Dutch variant of International Style architecture. A five-minute walk from there, the industrial-funky (7) Kunsthal, designed by Koolhaas in 1992 (Museumpark, 341 Westzeedijk; 31-10/440-0300; www.kunsthal.nl), hosts a wide variety of cultural exhibitions. Hop an express train to Amsterdam's Central Station.
Day 4: Amsterdam
There are a few unexpected gems amid the city's quaint brick town houses. The (8) Van Gogh Museum (7 Paulus Potterstraat; 31-20/570-5200; www.vangoghmuseum.nl) has two structures by noted architects of different eras: de Stijl master Gerrit Rietveld (of the famous angled red-black-and-blue armchair) designed the original brick building in the 1960's, and Japanese futurist Kisho Kurokawa added a boldly geometric, titanium-clad wing in 1999. To see the latest innovative architecture, take a stroll through the new neighborhoods springing up on reclaimed land in the city's Eastern Docklands, including IJburg, Borneo Peninsula, Sporenburg Peninsula, and Java Island.
Day 5: Amsterdam to Berlin (6 hours)
Ride the rails of Deutsche Bahn, the German railway, into Berlin's gleaming new (9) Hauptbahnhof. It's Europe's biggest rail hub, crowned by two huge vaulted glass roofs, one measuring 1,050 feet long, the other 525 feet.
Day 6: Berlin
Since German reunification, the city has been buzzing with construction—not all of it well designed. Among the noteworthy: Sir Norman Foster's renovation of the (10) Reichstag, home of the unified German senate, or Bundestag (1 Platz der Republik; 49-30/2270; www.bundestag.de). You can walk through the new glass dome above the senate chambers and gaze out on the Tiergarten and the freshly scrubbed Brandenburg Gate. Architect Daniel Libeskind's haunting (11) Jewish Museum (9-14 Lindenstrasse; 49-30/2599-3300; www.juedisches-museum-berlin.de) evokes despair with somber concrete and sliced and slivered metal. The Garden of Exile—an uneven forest of 20-foot-tall concrete pillars planted with olive trees—is especially disorienting. American architect Peter Eisenman's (12) Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (between Ebertstrasse and Wilhelmstrasse; 49-30/2639-4336), cited in last year's Design Awards, also moves visitors with its stark forms. The monument consists of 2,711 spare stone blocks of varying heights on uneven surfaces, covering 4.7 acres between the Tiergarten and bustling Potsdamer Platz.
