The work described in the OP is amazing, admittedly flamboyant! But it's still wall paper! It appears that my post was lost on some people at HN. The post ha

The work described in the OP is amazing, admittedly flamboyant! But it's still wall paper! It appears that my post was lost on some people at HN. The post had two points: (1) First, the architecture of the links I gave is astounding beyond belief. Some of those guys in old Vienna and Würzburg went way over the top and then higher still. If look in detail, it appears that they packed in as many ways to spend money on astounding decorations as possible! For anyone with the wealth of, say, the Holy Roman Empire to spend, it really is a cut above wall paper! With some irony, one of the buildings was done in 1880, that is, about the time of the Victorian Golden Age of the wall paper! (2) The other point was that I was making joke. The humor is from the reader seeing how unbelievably expensive those Vienna and Würzburg buildings must have been in comparison even with expensive wall paper! Or, as part of the joke, I was ignoring expenditures significant on the scale of Austria or Germany. > A bit impractical for most, don't you think? Right, part of the joke. Maybe one more point: As absurdly expensive as those buildings in Vienna and Würzburg must have been, they are astounding accomplishments. I can think of the many thousands of peasants who had to go hungry to pay for that "flamboyance", but, still, the results are astounding. And the architects didn't have computers to do the visualizations. The builders didn't have lasers to do the alignments. Maybe one more joke: How do they keep those buildings warm in a cold night in a cold winter with three feet, uh, a meter, of snow on the ground? Or, all that money spent but no good means of heating the place?