The Canadian War Museum (LeBreton Flats), Regeneration Hall & the National Holocaust Monument

Located 1.5 kilometres west of Parliament Hill along the banks of the Ottawa River at LeBreton Flats (a flat 20-minute riverside walk from the Hill or two stops west on O-Train Line 1 to Pimisi Station), the Canadian War Museum (Musée canadien de la guerre) is both a deeply moving historical chronicle and one of the most celebrated pieces of symbolic modern architecture in the world.

1. The Symbolic Architecture of Raymond Moriyama (Free Thursday Evenings)

Opened in May 2005 for the 60th anniversary of VE-Day, Japanese-Canadian architect Raymond Moriyama designed the museum around the theme of 'Regeneration', showing how nature heals scars left by conflict:

• The Living Grass Roof & Morse Code Windows: the building rises like a bunker out of the river floodplain under a 15,000-square-metre living roof of native grasses (which you can walk up onto from the river path). Look up at the narrow horizontal windows along the copper-clad eastern fin pointing straight toward the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill: those windows are arranged in dots and dashes of Morse Code that spell out 'Lest We Forget / N'oublions jamais' in both English and French.
• Memorial Hall (The Eleventh Hour of 11 November): inside the quiet concrete sanctuary of Memorial Hall rests a single object: the original headstone of Canada's Unknown Soldier from WWI. Moriyama engineered the single narrow window slot in the wall with such astronomical precision that at the eleventh hour of 11 November (Remembrance Day) every year, a single beam of natural sunlight shines through the slot and illuminates the headstone directly.

2. The 4 Chronological Galleries, LeBreton Tank Hall & The Holocaust Monument

Walk through the four main chronological galleries tracing conflicts on Canadian soil (from earliest First Nations warfare and the 1759 Plains of Abraham to the War of 1812) through WWI trenches (Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele), WWII (where you see Adolf Hitler's bulletproof 1940 Mercedes-Benz 770K parade car with its shattered windscreen) and UN Peacekeeping, before stepping down into the cavernous LeBreton Gallery of tanks and jets. Just across Booth Street outside the museum, walk through Daniel Libeskind's star-shaped concrete National Holocaust Monument.