In fact, Santiago seems like a smaller Buenos Aires, with a European style embodied in structures such as the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (National Museum of Fine Arts), housed within an elegant neoclassical building, and the Mercado Central (Central Market), with its filigreed steel framework imported from Britain.

FORBES: Lapostolle Residence, a Chilean Wine Country Hideaway

On the third floor of a handsome apartment building with an antique lift, the elegant Anichkov Pension has six rooms and one gorgeous apartment.

BBC: Mini guide to St Petersburg, Russia

Housed in an elegant five-storey Art Deco building of glass and steel tucked away in a Montparnasse cul-de-sac, the foundation was conceived by Mr Cartier-Bresson and his wife and fellow-photographer, Martine Franck, to showcase his life's work.

ECONOMIST: Henri Cartier-Bresson

While these are certainly not as high profile as the GM Building, they are all respectable--even elegant, in the case of 125 West 55th--office towers.

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Mies van der Rohe's early work in Berlin shouts avant-garde Europe just as the Chrysler Building in New York, which was completed in 1930, is an elegant reminder of the glitzy jazz age of the 1920s and Horace Walpole's 18th-century Thames-side villa evokes the eclectic sophistication of the countrified lifestyle that still stirs nostalgia in many a would-be squire's heart.

ECONOMIST: Architectural styles

The five-storey building has experienced a tumultuous history since it first opened its doors as an elegant shopping arcade in 1909.

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It will be the tallest building in New York, and it still has the subtle taper and the elegant octagonal ascent that David Childs gave it.

NEWYORKER: Shaping The Void