Gonda relocated to the more central Ferry Road (now Xikang Lu 西康路), where they lived in an affluent colonial-style villa, with a private tennis court, driving a large green Packard and employing several servants. As he rose to be a renowned architect, Gonda revolved with the foreign elites, including Shanghai's top oligarch Victor Sassoon. The family also socialized with the Hungarians, Austrians, and Russians, many of whom were former prisoners of war. C. H. Gonda had an architectural career that spanned 25 years. By some accounts, he designed more than forty buildings in Shanghai alone. He was an avid proponent of modernist style, having published a eulogy for it entitled "Modern and Ancient Forms in Local Architecture," writing under the pseudonym Adnog (his surname reversed), in which he expressed his animosity towards historicism: “As an engineer would refuse to design an airship in Gothic or Renaissance style, an architect should refuse to design a bank building or an apartment house in Renaissance of Gothic. […] The pulse of our time has to be heard, and from the chaos of indescribable horrors of bad taste slowly but surely the new style is awakening.” Gonda was among the first practitioners of the modernist, or art deco, style in Shanghai: “A new architecture has been born out of our mechanical age, and rightly or wrongly termed ‘modernistic,’ is the logical outcome of the tremendous social changes in our lives, in our methods of construction and in our needs and tastes.”. Consistent with his commitment to technological progress, Gonda considered cinema the most important of contemporary entertainments and embraced its influence on modern architecture. Among the two dozen of his buildings in China that have been identified to this day, more than half are movie theaters. Gonda was also a proficient oil painter; his paintings were frequently exhibited at Shanghai art shows, and he sat on the selection committees. Gonda was an active member of the Shanghai Jewish community and participated in its fund-raising campaigns, as well as in Russian charity events. In 1938, the architect's brother, Dr. Aurel Gonda, and his family escaped the fascist Vienna and joined C. H. Gonda in Shanghai. After the Communist victory in China in 1949, the brothers and their families left for the US and settled in Lakewood, New Jersey. Having retired from architecture, C. H. Gonda focused on landscape painting. He died in 1969, one year