Kyoto for The Time Travellers: a Friday-to-Monday weekend

Hiroshi Hara's 1997 glass canyon: climb the great stair to the Sky Garden and read the roof as a valley the city was never allowed to build.

Tadao Ando's 1984 shops stepped down to the Takase canal, the first time he let water into a commercial plan.

Dinner inside Kunio Maekawa's 1960 concert hall after Kengo Kuma's 2016 reopening, under the original beton brut ceiling.

Tokugawa Ieyasu's 1603 castle: the Ninomaru palace's nightingale floors chirp underfoot by design, and the painted rooms are where the last shogun handed power back in 1867.

The free English tour at two walks the Shishinden courtyard and the emperors' Heian-plan halls; no booking, just the gate on Kyoto Gyoen's west side.

An izakaya on the site of the inn the Shinsengumi stormed in 1864, with the famous staircase rebuilt; drink where the plotters did, then sleep nearer the river.

I. M. Pei's museum entered by tunnel and suspension bridge, eighty per cent of it buried in the mountain to satisfy the planning code.

Ando's open-air concrete ramps descending past ceramic reproductions of Monet and Michelangelo, the water sheeting down the walls.

A kaiseki house in the Higashiyama hills, Michelin-starred, on a quiet lane near Maruyama Park. Book a month ahead, ask for the late seating and wear shoes that slip off.

The seventeenth-century villa Bruno Taut called the proof of modernism; book the morning tour and watch the stepping stones set the pace.

Sachio Otani's 1966 trapezoid metabolist hall by the pond, where the Kyoto Protocol was signed; tours run on weekday mornings.

A counter bowl at Masutani or another of the regional stalls under Hara's roof trusses before the Haruka to the airport.