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

I. M. Pei and Henry Cobb's cruciform tower of 1962, the first building to plug into the underground city; cross the plaza and look back.

An evening light-and-music show in the Gothic Revival nave, a good way to see the vault in the dark; book the 19:00 slot.

A noisy, high-energy bistro in the former customs district of Old Montreal, with seafood and a long wine list; sit at the bar if you like to watch the kitchen.

Walk the foundations of the 1642 fort and the first Catholic cemetery under glass, with the old sewer running beneath; the crypt is the best of the three buildings.

A 1705 governor's house with vaulted cellars and Nantes-made panelling; Benjamin Franklin stayed in the room upstairs during the American occupation of 1776.

Dinner in the 1880 mansion of the railway baron who co-founded the CPR, panelled in walnut, with cocktails in the library.

Buckminster Fuller's 76-metre geodesic dome, the US pavilion that lost its acrylic skin to a fire in 1976; the escalator through the steel frame is the point.

Moshe Safdie's stacked concrete boxes, 354 modules in 146 homes, each with a garden on someone else's roof; the guided tour is the only way inside.

Wood-fired cooking in a clean-lined room of oak and white tile, with the kitchen on view; the right modern dinner after a day of concrete.

Roger Taillibert's 165-metre inclined tower beside the Olympic Stadium, the tallest leaning structure in the world; the funicular is the way up.

Patkau's library of fritted glass and yellow birch, the wooden reading rooms stacked inside a glass box; free to enter and rest.

Eat inside Raymond Affleck's 1967 brutalist megastructure, a concrete fortress with a roof garden; a quick lunch before the airport bus.