Antwerp Centraal Station is the bollocks. The station was finished in 1905, and they got the Olympics in 1920. Alcoholism may have been an invitation sport.
It's inconceivable that something as ambitious would be built today. But in 1905 King Leopold II still personally owned the Congo - an area, Wikipedia helpfully tells me, 76 times larger than Belgium. It made me think of Samuel Johnson's descriptions of the pyramids in Rasselas:
"I consider this mighty structure [the pyramid] as a monument to the insufficiency of human enjoyments. A king, whose power is unlimited, and whose treasures surmount all real and imaginary wants, is compelled to solace, by the erection of a Pyramid, the satiety of dominion and tastelessness of pleasures, and to amuse the tediousness of declining life, by seeing thousands laboring without end, and one stone, for no purpose, laid upon another. Whoever thou art that, not content with a moderate condition, imaginest happiness in royal magnificence, and dreamest that command or riches can feed the appetite of novelty with perpetual gratifications, survey the Pyramids, and confess thy folly."
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