From the Chrysler Building in New York to the pastel hotels of Miami Beach and the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Art Deco reshaped architecture in the years before World War II -- though the term wasn't coined until the 1960s, drawn from the name of the 1925 Paris decorative-arts exhibition that popularized the style.

WSJ: Touring Asia's Art Deco Gems in Shanghai and Napier, New Zealand

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

Yet Chrysler's real life's work was only beginning: he was about to found his car company and finish the then biggest and most beautiful skyscraper in New York, the Chrysler Building.

ECONOMIST: Motor industry