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Cheap flights proliferate, but the supply of Pragues is finite. Sooner or later, the avid city break traveller will have seen the gothic churches and toured the baroque palaces. And what then?

I went to Stuttgart to find out.

I’d been fascinated by a photograph of the city in the Jörg Friedrich book, Der Brand – the fire – which documents the allied bombing of German cities in World War Two. The 1944 picture shows a smoking, rubble-strewn wasteland, with only two buildings – a 1920s skyscraper and a department store built around 1930 – complete enough to confirm that it is indeed Stuttgart you’re looking at. No wonder it’s so modern, I thought.

Yet Stuttgart always was. Before the war it was already Germany’s most modern city. The design principles of the Bauhaus were adopted more enthusiastically here than anywhere else, and enough survives to make Stuttgart an open air museum of the modern movement.

The architecture lesson begins as you arrive at the main railway station. Strictly speaking it’s not Bauhaus: it was designed prewar by Paul Bonatz, a conservative architect who opposed Bauhaus ideas. Bonatz was more modern than he perhaps realized, for his station is clean and functional, its powerful tower topped by a three pointed Mercedes star. Under the Nazis Bonatz designed much of the autobahn system and won praise for his beautiful, functional bridge designs.

The view from the station is of modernity – but it’s very old modernity. Both the low, wide Hindenburg building and the elegant, stone-clad Hotel Graf Zeppelin were already there by the early 1930s. Much of the Europe Patrick Leigh Fermor saw on his walk to Constantinople in 1934 has vanished – but not the cubist bulk of the Graf Zeppelin, still the best in town and just as raw and modern as he described it. It’s strange to think that the Marcel Breuer chairs that would best match its clean 1920s lines will one day soon be antiques.

Three stops on the metro and a steep uphill climb bring you to the Weissenhofsiedlung, the housing development built in the late 1920s to show the potential of the new building forms. It’s a rare gift for any city to have a building by one of the early modern masters: Le Corbusier, say, Mies van der Rohe, or Hans Scharoun. The Weissenhofsiedlung has buildings by all three. The first surprise is how lovely the site is: Stuttgart may be a city of half a million people, but it sits in a deep valley surrounded by steep, wooded hills, often terraced for vineyards, which cut right into the heart of the city. The Weissenhofsiedlung is on the crest of one of these: if this was tomorrow calling, then tomorrow was a lovely day. The second surprise is how little these homes have dated. You have to pinch yourself to remember that these homes are 77 years old, old enough to be listed buildings requiring careful conservation. The Le Corbusier house is undergoing further restoration to turn it into a visitor centre complete with an apartment in original 1927 style.

A small exhibition in the Mies van der Rohe building tells the story of the scheme and its architects, and there’s a model to help you navigate the site. A little gallery nearby stages regular exhibitions on architectural themes.

From the Weissenhofsiedlung you can look back across parkland towards the city, still a forest of cranes today. Stuttgart is one of the capital cities of Germany’s industrial prowess: companies based here include Porsche, Bosch and Daimler Chrysler. You can visit the Porsche plant or the Mercedes museum.

An elegant television tower soars from a wooded hillside south of the city. It too is entering well-preserved middle age: it was the first of its kind in the world. Incredibly, construction started in 1954, just ten years after the smoking desolation pictured in Jörg Friedrich’s book. The tower’s 1950s modernism is still exciting and fun in a very infectious way, and after ascending to the very top you can sip coffee in the tiny café as you drink in the extraordinary views.

Even central Stuttgart is green, with swathes of parkland fringing the shopping district. It’s a lush setting for a fine cultural zone. Tucked behind the handsome Staatstheater – one of Germany’s most renowned cultural powerhouses – stands the building for which Stuttgart is nowadays best known: the Staatsgalerie, designed by the British architect James Stirling. Just as Stuttgart got in on the modern movement at the start, so it was ahead of the game with the postmodern. The Staatsgalerie is undoubtedly the most famous postmodern building in Europe. Stirling’s ground breaking design is now, incredibly, twenty years old, yet it is wearing well. Inside, the collection is world class, with Picassos from all eras and a cross section of European art from the middle ages to Joseph Beuys.

The Staatsgalerie was the first of a series of buildings by Stirling, so that the impression is of an entire city quarter in the same distinctive style. There’s the Baden Württemberg history museum next door, and the music school next to that. It won Stirling a posthumous RIBA prize in 1997.

Early in the New Year, Stuttgart’s artistic reputation gets a further boost with the opening of the Kunstmuseum, an elegant glass cube that is already a major landmark. Much of the exhibition space will be hidden below ground, in redundant tram tunnels. The museum will be unmissable, and not just for its architecture, for it will house the city’s collection of works by Otto Dix, the caustic painter of Weimar Republic scenes. It’s the largest collection of his work anywhere – a heady glimpse of the hedonism, suffering and political reaction of the era of Sally Bowles.

Facing the new gallery across the broad Schlossplatz is the Francophile, 18th century Neues Schloss, its 16th century predecessor a near neighbour. On picturesque Schillerplatz you can spy a typically Germanic gable, or a medieval church. Fringing the city centre, a few carefully preserved streets provide a picturesque backdrop for al fresco summer dining.

But Stuttgart isn’t the place to admire old palaces or worship in gothic cathedrals. Its temples are to consumerism. One of these is the Breuninger department store, its 1930s curves among the survivors of that 1944 photograph. Today, the guidebook claims it’s the second largest store in Europe after Harrods. Stuttgart is every inch the modern shopping mecca, its Königsstrasse the longest shopping precinct in Germany.

This is a city that feels impatient to meet the future. Public curiosity about the current orgy of development is satisfied with guided tours of the numerous building sites. Hard hats and cement-covered boots aren’t everyone’s idea of a relaxing weekend break. But when you’ve done medieval abbeys and baroque fountains, there’s something to be said for a weekend break that’s also a break with the past. Tomorrow, after all, is another day.

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