This article was originally published on Common Edge.
For architects and designers, unbuilt/unrealized projects are confounding, bittersweet, frustrating, elusive, even ghostly—the ultimate what-ifs. Often launched with the grandest ambitions, only to become derailed by the multiplicity of complications that can beset every proposed work of architecture. Author, editor, and critic Sam Lubell has spent a healthy chunk of his career cataloging these thwarted fever dreams. Now he has released, with co-author Greg Goldin, a new compilation, Atlas of Never Built Architecture (Phaidon), a global survey of more than 300 unbuilt projects ranging from the 20th century to the present day.
Recently I reached out to the writers to talk about the book, what unbuilt projects say about the culture at large, and some of their favorite unrealized projects. This interview was conducted via email, with Lubell and Goldin choosing to respond jointly.
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MCP: Martin C. Pedersen
SL & GG: Sam Lubell & Greg Goldin
MCP: Sam and Greg, this is perhaps the culmination of your fascination with unbuilt buildings. Both of you have organized numerous exhibitions featuring unbuilt projects. What inspired your fascination with this subject?
SL & GG: Our interest in the topic is endless. For one, we’ve always been fascinated with the gap between our reality and what we wish the world would be. Never Built crystalizes that in visual form, capturing the ideal visions of architects before they face the gauntlet of reality. We are obsessed with the treasure hunt: finding things that have been lost to history and discovering talents that have been overlooked. We hope the schemes we find will in many cases inspire would-be designers, and everyone, with new ideas, and a new, more visionary lens to look at the world. Also, it teaches us the full story of architecture, in all its messy glory. And it really puts architecture into very specific historical contexts. It ties architecture to the history of ideas; the history of political movements; the history of aesthetic and cultural movements in ways we don’t usually examine.
MCP: Talk about the methodology of the book. Unbuilt projects, especially in architecture, come in many iterations: trial balloons, faux projects, etc. What were the requirements for inclusion in the book?
SL & GG: A lot of the work comes from finding out who built things in a place, then finding out what didn’t make it—through archives, interviews, publications, competitions, and so many more ways. Finding the initial stuff was the easy part. Narrowing down from over 5,000 choices was not easy. We make a few notable exceptions, but generally we look at projects that were planned to be built—to have an impact in the real world. We’re also looking at projects that could have been game changers, that have a visceral impact on our imagination, or that showcase captivating ideas and reach that could have changed their sites, their cities, or even the world. Then you have to dig into the stories and the reasons things didn’t happen. That’s where you really do the heavy lifting.
MCP: Obviously, you had more entries than space. What kinds of projects generally failed to make the cut?
SL & GG: The reasons we didn’t choose projects are endless. Many projects just didn’t hit us in a visceral way; and they weren’t as potentially transformative as others. Sometimes we couldn’t find the full story, or the images weren’t available, or architects didn’t want to share them. Or they couldn’t admit a project was dead! And in an effort to widen the scope, we had to leave out many projects that were well known in favor of hidden gems. We wish we could have found more hidden projects from further afield. Divides in digital infrastructure, language, and resources kept too many projects hidden from us.
MCP: What do unbuilt projects say about the architectural culture, the political and economic culture, of the time they’re created in?
SL & GG: Architectural vision, and a general willingness to carry it out, goes in waves. Certain places at certain times can foster incredible ideas. Whether it be nations looking to portray themselves as advanced or progressive, or the shudders of protest against calcified ways of thinking or ruling. Such progress can be sullied for endless reasons: money, politics, squabbles, nefarious deeds, or worldwide events like wars and depressions. We can learn from those times’ visions, but also heed the lessons of when those visions creeped into destruction. The Russian Revolution sparked one set of visionary architectural ideas, just as Nazi Germany had their own set of horrible ambitions. The 1960s sparked a questioning of culture worldwide, but was also a time of wholesale destruction of history. We’re carried by currents as well, even if they’re not as overt. It’s important to be aware of these, and to question norms. To break them when they’ve become stultifying.
MCP: How did you evaluate the larger questions looming over unbuilt projects? Whether a particular project was abject folly or pure hubris? Or a genuine missed opportunity? Which ones stood out in that regard?
SL & GG: We work as hard as we can to be agnostic. Our role is to discover the project and the story behind it, not to evaluate its quality. To give the reader the opportunity to see it in its contemporary context without telling them whether it’s a monstrosity or a triumph.
MCP: Do you have a particular favorite of all the unbuilt projects? What is it, and why does it interest you?
SL & GG: We don’t have a favorite, but one we love is Fabio Panteado Bay of Pigs Monument. We love the idea that Fidel Castro was set to build a structurally audacious, brutalist spectacle to glorify his state and humiliate the U.S. And how Brazilian architect Fabio Penteado was prevented from leaving his country to work on the project after a Fascist coup in Brazil.
MCP: For most designers, ideas from unbuilt and unrealized projects eventually and perhaps seep into realized and completed projects. What were some of the interesting strands of design DNA that you discovered in these unbuilt projects? What realized projects do you see and identify in the unbuilt ones?
SL & GG: We like to call these “ghosts”: unbuilt ideas that haunt the built world. Even if a project fails, the ideas behind it don’t disappear. They can show up in their architect’s other projects, in another architects’ work, or as fragments of a million other ideas.
Two examples of how ideas can travel from one drawing board to another, maybe through osmosis or secret airwaves, who knows: Mussolini’s arch for his Expo 42, a planned world’s fair that never was, side-by-side with Eero Saarinen’s 1965 Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, and Peter Eisenman’s Mobius Strip Max Reinhardt Haus, for Berlin in 1992, as a blueprint for Rem Koolhaas’ 2004 CCTV Headquarters, in Beijing. Of course, architects don’t let go of their ideas, either. Consider Mies’ 1921 glass-and-steel Friedrichstrasse skyscraper: although enormously influential, it doesn’t really become a building until his twin North Lake Shore Drive apartment buildings in Chicago in 1951, followed by Seagram in 1958.
MCP: How do you envision readers actually reading it? Do they use it as a resource book, or do they simply read it as a narrative experience?
SL & GG: We think the book can be read as many ways as you like. As a geographical tour, as an historical tour, as a romp through the ways in which buildings never get built, or as trompe l’oeil that deceives you into believing an alternative reality is reality. Or just for the pure pleasure of peering into images, which themselves can reveal so much about an architect’s moods and dispositions, conceits and obsessions.
