Zagreb, Croatia -- There is one architect's work we missed because we were standing on it: That of Zagreb's clever urban planner, Milan Lenuci, who laid out the "Horseshoe" we see rising in green above the railroad tracks in this Google map. His vision started around 1880 when the city did not own most of the land needed. On the privately-owned vacant land, he staged public events and built cheap skating rinks and soccer fields in order to delay the owners from developing the plots before public institutions could get funding to buy and build. By doing so, he out-maneuvered the Hapsburg bureaucracy which would have moved too slowly to stop private capital from developing this land. More than a century later, we swim through the Green Horseshoe's many spectacular revivalist buildings like so many fish oblivious to Lenuci's water.

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