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Unbuilt cities

13 September 2019

  • Fernando Romero’s unrealised plan for a linear park to be built on Chapultepec Avenue, one of Mexico City’s oldest streets.

    Reclaimed lakes and giant airports: how Mexico City might have looked

    The Mexican capital was founded by Aztecs on an island in a vast lake. No wonder water flows through so many of its unbuilt projects

11 June 2019

  • Depthscraper – an ‘underground skyscraper’ designed to address the issue of earthquakes in Japan, published in 1931.

    Unbuilt Tokyo: 'depthscrapers' and a million-person pyramid

    Had the creators of the underground skyscraper had their way, the Japanese capital might have looked very different indeed

10 May 2019

  • The unbuilt Midtown Airport

    A totem in Times Square: New York as it might have looked – in pictures

    From an airport in Midtown stretching 144 blocks to a neoclassical civic centre covering Roosevelt Island, here are some proposals that would have changed the face of New York City

18 March 2019

  • Jean-Paul Viguier’s EuroRoute Bridge

    The bridges that never were – in pictures

    Bridges are often defining urban features – but what if your city had chosen one of these designs instead?

12 March 2019

  • Architect William Bridges’ 1793 proposal for a bridge across the Avon Gorge in the spot where the Clifton Suspension Bridge now stands.

    Weirs and aerial walkways: the Bristol that might have been

    From otherworldly bridges to filled-in docks, here are some of the best and worst unrealised urban proposals for Bristol

24 January 2019

  • View of Niagara Falls from a helicopter.

    How Gillette's founder dreamed of a car-free, moneyless metropolis

    Long before the razor firm’s ‘toxic masculinity’ advert, its founder advocated replacing all North American cities with a single socialist utopia beside Niagara Falls

9 November 2018

  • Airport above river Thames

    Trafalgar pyramid? A look at an alternative London

    These rejected architecture and transport plans give a glimpse of how different the city might have been

5 November 2018

  • Our New Age comic strips

    Minnesota Experimental City: the 1960s town based on a comic strip

    It had cars on rails, 100% recycling and a nuclear power station in the centre, all covered by a massive dome. So what went wrong with Athelstan Spilhaus’s vision of the future?

5 January 2018

  • Robert Moses’ Proposal for the Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX).

    Unbuilt cities: the outrageous highway schemes left as roads to nowhere

    The postwar passion for highway construction saw cities around the world carved up in the name of progress. But as communities fought back many schemes were abandoned – their half-built traces showing what might have been

4 July 2017

  • Panorama proposal for the layout of the city centre, Liverpool by Shankland Cox Partnership, c.1963 RIBA Collections

    Unbuilt Liverpool: the city that might have been

    Liverpool’s mercantile grandeur endures – but its architectural history is littered with compromised visions, botched projects and grand designs never realised

8 March 2017

  • Palace of the Soviets

    Unbuilt Moscow: the 'new Soviet' city that never was – in pictures

    As the centenary of the Russian revolution approaches, the designs of top Soviet architects for the capital’s future reveal their visionary aspirations

11 February 2017

  • Mies van der Rohe’s Mansion House Square proposals for the site of No1 Poultry.

    Mies’s Mansion House Square: the best building London never had?

    Jack Self
    Mies van der Rohe’s plans for an office tower in the City were scuppered by Prince Charles’ criticism and Margaret Thatcher’s fear of new public space – yet this tale has as much to do with shifts in public opinion against modernist architecture

9 February 2017

  • Lloyd Wright LA Civic Center

    Unbuilt Los Angeles: the city that might have been – in pictures

    From the offshore Santa Monica freeway to a mini Las Vegas with pyramids and the Parthenon, Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell look at the LA that never happened

12 January 2017

  • Gilbert's elevated railway, 1870

    Never built New York: the city that might have been – in pictures

    From an elevated 19th-century pneumatic railway to a skyscraper cathedral and a Native American alternative to the Statue of Liberty, Never Built New York chronicles ambitious plans for the city which never saw the light of day

23 August 2016

  • Central London monorail

    How London might have looked: from Regent St monorail to a straight Thames

    The London skyline has been saved from some questionable designs over the years – including a massive stone pyramid in Trafalgar Square. Thankfully none of these schemes ever got off the drawing board

25 January 2016

  • Fleeing the Great Fire of London, 1666 – an illustration from 1815.

    How London might have looked: five masterplans after the great fire of 1666

    From Wren’s wide boulevards to Newcourt’s uniform grids, a new exhibition reveals the alternative plans to rebuild London after it was destroyed by the great fire, and asks: what could it have looked like now?

14 April 2015

  • Soho plan

    King's Cross airport? The outlandish plans for London that almost got built

    From a rival to the Eiffel Tower that would have dwarfed the Shard, to a circular airport perched over Kings Cross station, Douglas Murphy remembers some ill-fated projects that could have transformed the capital
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