Magna Plaza

This guide to Magna Plaza in Amsterdam opens in February 1991, when builders cracked open a beam in Amsterdam's old central post office and found it hollow, a building rotting from within for a century. It follows architect Cornelis Peters, who designed this Neo-Gothic showpiece in the 1890s to rival his mentor's Rijksmuseum, and the derision it drew from Amsterdammers who nicknamed it Pear Castle. The post office sold the building in 1987 for seven and a half million guilders and simply walked away.