It is a gracefully sited monument, and a showplace that flatters almost all the art placed inside it.
Combining both historical relics of an ancient culture and new urban construction, ranging from fast-food franchises to plush hotels for foreign tourists and corporate travelers, it has become a showplace of modern China and one of the world's great cities.
Rebuilt, it became the Baroque showplace of Silesia, only to wither again under 18th-century Prussian domination.
Today, as Avalon, it has been remodeled as a lavish nightclub used for television specials, premiere parties and film locations as well as a showplace for top music artists.
He built a showplace mansion in San Francisco (which burned down in 1906) and a second home in New York City.
The most absorbing interests of his life were his friendships and a small villa that he acquired at Twickenham in 1747 and transformed into a pseudo-Gothic showplace known as Strawberry Hill.
Local attractions include the J. Paul Getty Museum, which was based on the plans of an ancient Roman villa, and the Malibu Lagoon Museum, which preserves an early 20th-century mansion and serves as a showplace for tiles made by Malibu Potteries (1926 32).
A national showplace, the Palace of Fine Arts has interior architectural decorations representing Mexican plant and animal life and masks recalling pre-Hispanic traditions.
After World War II it became the leading showplace for contemporary art and the international avant-garde.
The South Carolina State House, a grand, copper-domed structure in downtown Columbia, is a showplace for the state's long history of hellbent defiance.
"We're not interested if people are trying to be funny," Kurt Andersen, who is one of the three writers of "Loose Lips," a revue that opened last Thursday at a refurbished showplace on West Seventy-second Street called the Triad supper club, observed the other day.
