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

Gehry's twelve glass sails over a cascade, best read from the rooftop terraces where the steel armature is exposed.

The 1937 exposition pavilion stripped back to raw concrete by Lacaton & Vassal, open until midnight with whatever is on.

The oldest café in the city, 1686, where Voltaire drank forty coffees a day and Danton, Marat and Robespierre plotted upstairs; coq au vin under Napoleon's hat.

Louis IX's reliquary chapel of 1248, fifteen windows of thirteenth-century glass holding the walls up; the first slot of the morning, before the light moves.

A full apartment from Le Corbusier's Marseille Unité rebuilt inside the museum, with the plaster casts of cathedral portals upstairs.

Nouvel's glass roof over the museum, lattice shadows on the table and the Eiffel Tower filling the window.

The 1931 machine for living, pilotis and ribbon windows and the ramp to the roof, forty minutes from Châtelet.

Le Corbusier's two student halls, 1933 and 1959, a generation apart in concrete; the lobbies are open.

The 1927 brasserie whose pillars were painted by the Montparnasse artists who ate there on credit.

The guided tour at opening through the Capetian hall, the Revolutionary tribunal and Marie-Antoinette's cell, with the tablet that rebuilds each room as it was.

Gehry's 1994 American Center, now the cinema museum, with Méliès' props in a building that already looks like a film set.

A food hall inside Freyssinet's 1929 concrete rail halle, trattoria plates under the original vaulted shells.