Philharmonie

This is Luxembourg's national concert hall — officially the Grand Duchess Joséphine-Charlotte Concert Hall — and its most distinctive feature is the one you're looking at right now: 823 slender white steel columns ringing the building in three and four rows, like a forest. The French architect Christian de Portzamparc wanted you to enter the world of music through a filter, and this is the filter. At night the columns are lit from within, turning the whole building into a glowing, almost otherworldly presence on the Kirchberg plateau.

It's home to the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra, which began life as the house orchestra of Radio Luxembourg and was taken over by the state when RTL was privatised in 1992. Parliament voted to build it a hall in 1995, Portzamparc won the competition in 1997, and it opened on the 26th of June 2005 with a world premiere commissioned for the night, Penderecki's Eighth Symphony. The main auditorium seats 1,500; around 400 performances a year run across its three halls, from symphonies to jazz to concerts for children. Kirchberg was farmland until the 1960s, and this building was part of a deliberate decision to make it a cultural district and not just a home for banks and EU offices.

The building sits on the Place de l'Europe, surrounded by other Kirchberg landmarks — the European Court of Justice, the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Thüngen — making this whole plateau a useful next stop if you want to see the more recent, forward-looking side of Luxembourg after spending time in the medieval old town below.