Unbuilt Architecture and City Plans

As I mentioned, some 'paper architecture' is intended purely for provoking thought. In the 18th century, Etienne-Louis Boullée wrote a long essay on architectural composition illustrated by himself with depictions of gargantuan edifices that would have been economically impossible but which he used for teaching the principles of architecture and which proved immensely influential on 20th century modernism.

Below, his Cenotaph for Isaac Newton. Inspired by the tomb of Augustus and inspiring one of the Frank Lloyd Wright schemes I've shown above, and probably Tatlin's tower with its cosmic associations (and Albert Speer's Grosse Halle...).
 

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Lebbeus Woods was a pure paper architect. In this video, Dami Lee offers a good explanation of the role of paper architecture and its presence in popular culture with a discussion of the manga BLAME! and Woods' work.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ynSG5GLoQ0


Her channel is here, and the videos are enjoyable and accessible:

www.youtube.com

DamiLee

Architecture and design with Dami
www.youtube.com www.youtube.com

Interestingly, the older ones are about making a living as a young architect and the more recent ones look at fictional and theoretical architecture.
 
Don't forget Minnesota Experimental City.

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More to be found here
www.archdaily.com

Gallery of Minnesota's Experimental City of the Future that Never Got Built - 1

Image 1 of 14 from gallery of Minnesota's Experimental City of the Future that Never Got Built. Conceptual drawing of MXC’s primary domed enclosure, proposed to be a mile wide in early discussions, but eventually scaled back. Image Courtesy of The Experimental City Documentary
www.archdaily.com www.archdaily.com
 
I have a vague memory about seeing concepts on buildings capable of surviving bombing air raids. I guess it was an old science magazine but I can't locate anything about that on internet. It was something similar to a "flakturm" but in a much bigger scale. Any clue?
 
Antonio said:
I have a vague memory about seeing concepts on buildings capable of surviving bombing air raids. I guess it was an old science magazine but I can't locate anything about that on internet. It was something similar to a "flakturm" but in a much bigger scale. Any clue?
Click to expand...
en.wikipedia.org

Zoo Tower - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
Archigram was one wildest visionary group in Architecture of 1960s
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2jE_otnIpY&t=484s


They went full commercialise housing construction in style of car industry !
One of there concept was Plug-in City
a conceptual city comprising personalised pre-fabricated homes that are inserted into high-rise megastructures.

View: https://youtu.be/v3HPCarhOyg


They went even step further proposing to put those pre-fabricated homes into The Walking City

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYHG_t7SF8E
 
Antonio said:
I have a vague memory about seeing concepts on buildings capable of surviving bombing air raids. I guess it was an old science magazine but I can't locate anything about that on internet. It was something similar to a "flakturm" but in a much bigger scale. Any clue?
Click to expand...
I seem to remember seeing this too, but can't remember where.
 
More London never-builts:
neverwasmag.com

Unbuilt London

From a Ponte Vecchio-style bridge across the Thames to a monorail running through Regent Street.
neverwasmag.com neverwasmag.com

www.ianvisits.co.uk

RingRail – the 1973 railway plan that paved the way for the London Overground

In 1973, a plan for a new RingRail around London was proposed, and although it was never built as planned, it sort of did get built much later, as the London Overground.
www.ianvisits.co.uk


The Guardian also had an Unbuilt Cities series a few years back with more global coverage:

Unbuilt cities | The Guardian

Latest news, sport, business, comment, analysis and reviews from the Guardian, the world's leading liberal voice
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
A 1970s proposal for the site upon which Portcullis House was eventually built. This is the building from which Professor Bernard Quatermass gazes down upon HMS Arbalest in the 1979 novel 'Quatermass' by Nigel Kneale.

www.ianvisits.co.uk

Unbuilt London: A Bronze Slab Next to Parliament

In the early 1970s, plans were announced to demolish a cluster of old buildings opposite Big Ben and replace them with a vast monolith covered in bronzed glass.
www.ianvisits.co.uk
 
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A speculative proposal from 1904 for a massive Victorian Gothic tower and halls to be erected next to Westminster Abby to make the space more appropriate for future Imperial coronations. Apparently the proposal generated quite a lot of opposition at the time it was proposed, and never got off the ground.

www.ianvisits.co.uk

Unbuilt London: Imperial Monumental Halls

Westminster Abbey is getting a bit crowded someone once thought, with all these monuments to dead people cluttering up the place. What's needed is a great big extension, and a massive tower.
www.ianvisits.co.uk
 
One of my favourite unbuilt buildings, the Great Model Plan for St Paul's, London, by Christopher Wren, 1673. I once had the pleasure of being shown this specially when on a tour and I asked to see it. It wasn't part of the tour but the guides kindly took me to the room. The lights came on slowly (part of the preservation protocol is to keep light low and not subject it to sudden changes of light, temperature, or humidity), adding to the drama as it appeared first as a dim shape in the gloom and then in full illumination.

The Anglican church rejected this design as being 'Popish' (as someone would say 'woke' today), but more reasonably, it would take decades to finish and could not be used until it was. The design that was actually built, could serve as a church with only the nave completed. Wren did get the last laugh - the design that was finally approved appeared to be begin building, but the foundations seemed rather more massive and then when the walls finally rose, it could be seen that he had persisted with further development, still referring to elements of the Great Model.

Wren lived to be 90 and actually saw the cathedral essentially completed.

There's another story about Wren too: a client for another project insisted that extra columns be used to support a beam and he reluctantly complied. More than three hundred years later when renovations were underway, contractors discovered that the columns were half an inch too short and were not in fact touching, let alone supporting the beam.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKGkZtN_kB8&t=5s
 

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Wren's plan for rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666. Obviously not followed in the reconstruction - the problem was that while the city may have been just smouldering ashes and rubble, people still owned title to land there, so the reconstruction had to approximately follow the old mediaeval plan after all.
 

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Another great unbuilt church with a big model. The Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral by Edwin Lutyens, 1933. The crypt was completed but WWII put a stop to construction and then it was considered too expensive. A different architect completed it in Brutalist style and at a smaller scale.
 

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What finally happened, by Frank Gibberd. You can see the Lutyens-designed crypt in one of the photos and the aerial view shows the footprint of the original design.
 

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The 1930s seems to have been a time when newspapers published all kinds of speculative ideas on what should be done with London, for example canalizing the Thames.

www.ianvisits.co.uk

Unbuilt London: Diverting the Thames through South London

The River Thames flows through a very expensive part of London, so wouldn’t it make more sense to divert it somewhere cheap — like South London, and then make better use of the land in central London? That was the<span class=
www.ianvisits.co.uk

As mentioned in the linked article the proposal included the idea of building an airport that straddled the Thames, this seems to have been a popular idea as this second article shows.

www.ianvisits.co.uk

Unbuilt London: The Thames Airport

No not that one, the other one. No, not that one either, the other one. Yes, this one -- the giant airport right in the centre of London on the Thames, next to Parliament.
www.ianvisits.co.uk
 
Rhinocrates said:
There's another story about Wren too: a client for another project insisted that extra columns be used to support a beam and he reluctantly complied. More than three hundred years later when renovations were underway, contractors discovered that the columns were half an inch too short and were not in fact touching, let alone supporting the beam.
Click to expand...
Those are insane levels of pettiness
 

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