‘Atlas of Never Built Architecture’ delves into unrealised architectural ambition

Phaidon's new Atlas of Never Built Architecture is a fascinating alternative history of the buildings that never were, grand plans that failed to get off the drawing board, due to politics, money, or a straightforward lack of any realistic chance for construction. Every era has its architectural great white whales. This new atlas features 300 projects culled from the collective power of several centuries’ worth of architectural hubris. That is a powerful source of creativity, idiosyncratic ideas and just plain megalomania, as many of the entries demonstrate.

Flicking through Atlas of Never Built Architecture

Setting the book out in a traditional atlas format, with projects grouped by location, the authors, Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin, have uncovered the unusual and offbeat in addition to some familiar schemes that have endured in the cultural imagination, despite their ultimate failure. Frank Lloyd Wright's Chicago tower is the forerunner of the modern hyperscraper, for example, while the world is so overrun with starry, shapely icons that it's unsurprising to discover many, many more that only got as far as a sketch, model or render. 

Among our personal favourites are Daniel Libeskind's ill-fated 1996 design for London’s Victoria & Albert Museum extension, feted and eagerly awaited but kicked to the curb by lack of funds. Amanda Levete's Exhibition Road Quarter scheme occupies the spot once assigned to the deconstructivist's tumbling cubes, a building that would have changed the scope and scale of South Kensington. The very next project is by Levete’s former practice, Future Systems, the original ‘blob’, a ceramic white structure intended for a prominent corner site on Trafalgar Square in 1985. 

Every major city is represented by projects that would have had a similarly seismic impact – the ‘what-ifs’ are legion. However, among the regrets are plenty of near misses. Perhaps unsurprisingly, quite a few of these are in the brutalist architecture style, an era of high ambition, grand scale and not a jot of nostalgia or sympathy for the past.

The Middle East is well represented, with its penchant for building the unbuildable frequently derailed (only to be replaced by something even more outré). In 2002, Arata Isozaki looked set to realise a version of the City in the Air project from his student days in the utopian 1960s as the Qatar National Library; having championed the project for years, the Emir quietly dropped the idea.

Many of these projects have no visible means of support, structurally as well as financially, but the purity of the architectural rendering, untrammelled by budgets or building technology, continues to hold our interest. Whether brutalist, metabolist or constructivist, a lot of unbuilt architecture remains hugely influential. 

Above all, many of the entries in the Atlas of Never Built Architecture reveal the pivot points that shaped the modern world, as changes in attitudes, cultures and regimes consigned architects’ grand plans to history. For example, how different would things be if Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1957 Plan for Greater Baghdad had been enthusiastically adopted?

Atlas of Never Built Architecture, Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin, Phaidon, £100

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