Unbuilt Architecture and City Plans

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

Unbuilt London: The Battersea Bullet train

In the late 1980s, there were plans to turn the empty hulk of Battersea Power Station into a huge theme park, and it was to come with its own high-speed rail link - the Battersea Bullet.
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.
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Those are insane levels of pettiness
 
An informative primer on architectural engineering, looking at how tension in an inverted model can be used to model compression in a completed structure and how it generates new, elegant forms. Admittedly this isn't about unbuilt architecture but it follows on from my posts on Wren's St Paul's. He doesn't mention that St Paul's actually has circumferential iron chains at the base of the masonry dome acting in tension to resist the outward forces produced by the weight above, along with all the cleverly concealed buttressing.

We really see the technique bloom with Gaudi, though I was annoyed that some on the illustrations of the Sagrada Familia models are hideous AI creations.

Name drop: New Zealand architect Mark Burry is mentioned. He's actually been at RMIT in Melbourne for decades now but back in the day he taught me here in NZ. He would spend several months each year in Barcelona directing construction. His lectures on how they modelled the complex hyperboloid forms and used those models for computer aided manufacturing of cut stone were fascinating.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRv_syz2DAc
 
It's not appropriate to comment on this news article (don't mention the war), but it reminded me of this collage by the Austrian architect, Hans Hollein, which was a kind of spoof of Le Corbusier's argument that the ocean liner was the exemplar for mass housing.

ukdefencejournal.org.uk

Russian aircraft carrier crew sent to frontline in Ukraine

Russia has formed a mechanised battalion from the crew of its only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov.
ukdefencejournal.org.uk ukdefencejournal.org.uk

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Rhinocrates said:
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.
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I've always enjoyed Lebbeus Woods' work and I remember when I saw the movie Twelve Monkeys and thinking he worked on it, only to find out they simply ripped off his image (below) without his permission. He won the lawsuit.

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I wonder how much of Project NEOM will end up in this category? They've already radically reduced the length of the Line from 100 miles down to ten miles, IIRC.
 

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