Grosses Schauspielhaus Berlin, Hans Poelzig, 1919

If the Nazis felt obliged to cover up an architect’s work as an example of degenerate art, as happened to the stalactite vaults of the Schauspielhaus, it suggests that the architect was doing something right. In the case of Hans Poelzig, one of the most original of German architects, he was doing something spectacularly right, creating a mesmerising interior with the qualities of both circus tent and cave in response to the director Max Reinhardt’s dream of making a theatre accessible to all. Now destroyed, not as might be thought by bombing, but through neglect.