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Theater Tuschinski – The Cinema at the Devil’s Corner

Abraham Tuschinski and his dream Abraham Icek Tuschinski was only 17 years old when in 1903, fleeing the pogrom, he left his native Poland for America. He temporarily stopped in Rotterdam, waiting for further transport, and then he decided to stay right there and try to realize his dreams in the Netherlands, which is the closest thing to America that can be found on the old continent anyway.

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László Hudec in the City of Sin -The Architecture of Interwar Shanghai-

After a humiliating defeat in the Opium War, the Chinese Empire, until then frozen in the past, got a new chance. Chinese ports are open for trade with the world, and in strategic places, locations have been designated for the settlement of foreign entrepreneurs, so-called “concessions”, for which a special legal system will apply.

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Madrid’s Last ‘House of Malice’ – The final relic of an architectural absurdity

Until the middle of the sixteenth century, Madrid was a boring, provincial Castilian town, with barely twenty thousand inhabitants, whose main problem was how to kill time. The only political activity in the city was the occasional session of the Cortes, a traveling royal court and parliament, which would sometimes visit there, but whose decisions and pompous proclamations had no real impact on royal politics anyway.

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My name is Lautner, …John Lautner – Timeless Architecture

Many architects think they know how to design a futuristic house, a space age house, a residence for cosmonauts, high tech rich people or James Bond. According to a widespread understanding, such a house should, in at least one part, have a circular or oval base, glass walls, large interior spaces, very little furniture, and it should be dominated by structural elements of unusual curved lines.

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Burg Eltz – The Original of the Forgery –

The valleys of the Rhine and Moselle rivers have a special place in the obsession with medieval castles. It is interesting that this “Rhine romanticism”, admiration for the charm of the ruined castles of the area, first caught the upper social classes in England, and only a little later this obsession spread among the common people in Germany, where it became the forerunner of the ill-fated German national romanticism.

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Torre Velasca in Milan – Anatomy of a Failure –

The ugliest buildings in the world As in some other fields of creativity, so in architecture, in addition to the selection for the most successful and beautiful buildings, there are also selections of buildings that are the most incongruous, the ugliest and considered the biggest professional failures.

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