When Bonn lost out to Berlin as Germany’s capital city, the government compensated the Rhine region by picking up the huge tab for the Arp Museum and its new extension, designed by star architect Richard Meier.

The train journey on the embankment of the Rhine River from Koblenz to Cologne is scenic, but otherwise unremarkable, except for the stop at Bahnhof Rolandseck (Rolandseck Railway Station).

From the grotty outdoor platform, the commuter descends into another world. Even the walls of the lavatories on the way down to the main entrance hall of the three-story high classical-style railroad station are adorned with art.

Bahnhof Rolandseck was erected in 1856 to service the Bonn-Rolandseck line, but also turned into a high society juncture where European culture intersected with politics. Among its many patrons attending concerts or poetry readings on the top level of the station were Queen Victoria, “iron chancellor” Otto von Bismarck, Heinrich Heine, Franz Liszt and George Bernard Shaw.

It is now the only functioning railway station in Germany that is also a museum, which is named after the artists Hans Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. The Arp Museum faces the famous Seven Mountains on the other side of the Rhine. At the top of the forested escarpment above the train station is the new modernist edifice of white panels and glass facades in bold geometric forms that is the trademark of Pritzker-Prize-winning New York architect Richard Meier.

Meier’s extension to the Arp Museum was officially opened on Friday, Sept. 28, at a ceremony attended by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Social Democratic party leader Kurt Beck, who is also the premier of Rhineland-Palatinate, the state where the picturesque town of Rolandseck is situated.

The Meier complex can be accessed at the entrance to the train station, which leads to a 120-meter (394-foot) subterranean passageway beneath the railroad tracks. An 18-meter-long florescent spiral by artists Barbara Trautmann, titled “Kaa,” snakes through and illuminates a portion of the tunnel.

“The journey to the Meier building is a total adventure,” said museum director Klaus Gallwitz, who led a tour at a press preview. At the end of the tunnel is a bank of glass elevators transporting visitors up a milky, cone-shaped chute that emerges from the underground and suddenly becomes infused with daylight. The elevators then open up to panoramic vistas of the Rhine.