Modernist architecture is not just a style, it was a programme for how cities should be built and how people should live. The cities below did not just commission a few famous buildings: they engaged with the Modernist project deeply enough that it changed their urban fabric in ways that are still readable and genuinely worth seeking out.

The Cities

Berlin

Berlin's engagement with Modernist architecture runs from the Weimar Republic through the Cold War division and into the reunified city's contemporary building boom. The Bauhaus movement, founded in Dessau and Weimar, found its most ambitious urban expression in the Berlin housing estates of the 1920s, particularly the Hufeisensiedlung (horseshoe estate) in Britz and the Weiße Stadt in Reinickendorf, both UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The East German period produced the Fernsehturm television tower and the grand Stalinist boulevard of Karl-Marx-Allee, which is Modernism of a very different political register. The post-reunification period added Foster's Reichstag dome and a cluster of significant contemporary buildings around Potsdamer Platz. Berlin's Modernist history is politically complex and architecturally extraordinary.

Best for: travelers interested in Modernism as a political and social project, not just an aesthetic.

Rotterdam

Rotterdam was almost entirely destroyed by German bombing in 1940, and the city made a deliberate decision to rebuild as a Modernist city rather than reconstruct what was lost. The result is the most ambitious collection of post-war and contemporary architecture in the Netherlands, including Piet Blom's Cube Houses (1984), the Erasmus Bridge (1996), the Markthal (2014), and the recently completed Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, the world's first publicly accessible art storage facility. Rotterdam is what happens when a city decides to treat architectural ambition as a competitive advantage and sticks with that decision for eighty years.

Best for: architecture travelers who want a city that has fully committed to contemporary building as urban identity.

Copenhagen

Copenhagen's Modernist tradition is rooted in Danish functionalism, a strand of the movement that prioritised human scale, material honesty, and integration with landscape over grand gesture. The Sydney Opera House's architect, Jørn Utzon, was Danish, and the tradition that produced him is visible throughout the city. The SAS Royal Hotel (Arne Jacobsen, 1960) is one of the most complete Modernist building-and-interior designs in Europe, with Jacobsen designing everything from the building envelope to the cutlery. The newer Ørestad district contains works by Bjarke Ingels Group and Jean Nouvel that continue a strong tradition of architecturally ambitious public and residential building.

Best for: travelers interested in the Scandinavian functionalist tradition and the relationship between Modernism and livability.

Marseille

Marseille contains Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation (1952), the most influential housing building of the twentieth century and still one of the most significant Modernist structures in Europe. The building is a full urban vertical community: 337 apartments, two internal shopping streets, a hotel, a gymnasium, a running track on the roof, and a nursery school. It was the prototype for social housing developments across the world, most of which failed where the original succeeded because they dropped the communal facilities and the quality of construction. Marseille also has the MuCEM (Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations), designed by Rudy Ricciotti and completed in 2013, which is one of the best contemporary buildings in France.

Best for: travelers who want to experience Le Corbusier's signature building as it was intended, in a city with a strong Mediterranean character around it.

Vienna

Vienna's relationship with Modernism is mediated by its extraordinary Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) legacy, but the city produced some of the most important Modernist thinkers and buildings of the early twentieth century. Adolf Loos's Looshaus on the Michaelerplatz (1911), facing the Hofburg Palace, caused a genuine scandal when it was built because it had no ornament: the Emperor Franz Joseph reportedly refused to open the windows of the Imperial apartments that faced it. The Vienna social housing programme of the interwar period (Red Vienna, 1919-1934) produced the Karl-Marx-Hof and over 60,000 municipal apartments, a social programme of Modernist architecture that had no equivalent in scale or quality anywhere in Europe.

Best for: travelers interested in Modernism as social policy, particularly the Red Vienna housing programme.