Unbuilt Architecture and City Plans

I am still looking for a UK Sunday Newspaper colour supplement from I think 1969 which has an article about a design for the UK Parliament to be built in the countryside near Windsor outside London. The model illustrated reminded my father (an architect) of one of the new University Campuses that had just been built in the UK.
Had Parliament moved out of London and away from the rickety but impressive Westminster Parliament it might have been different
 
hesham said:
Hi,

www.theage.com.au

A History of Melbourne's Future

A new show of the unbuilt plans, underground roads and art projects that would've changed the face of the city
www.theage.com.au
Click to expand...

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Assuming this isn't the delusional babblings that it seems most likely to be, this may have resulted in some interesting architecture:

www.yahoo.com

Bush official claims US built secret $21T underground ‘city’ for rich and powerful to live if ‘near-extinction event’ happens

A former housing official who worked under President George H. W. Bush has made an astonishing claim that the U.S. government spent years funneling money into the creation of a secret underground "city" where the rich and powerful can shelter in the event of a "near-extinction event."
www.yahoo.com www.yahoo.com
 
The Bilbao Guggenheim. Actually this is very much nonunbuilt, but it will be of interest to readers of this forum for its design and engineering aspects and since this thread is active, I may as well add it here.

For the use of Dassault-created CATIA software for CAD, start from 9:20. It's clad in titanium and that's hard to acquire, so how did they get it? Start at 18:20 for a surprise. On the legacy it has had on the relationship between architects and engineers, see 26:39.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnrPZuN0m-0&t=64s&ab_channel=TheB1M
 
There's no end of fictional buildings and here's a fictional building with no end. Jorge Luis Borges' 'The Library of Babel' is a literary thought experiment with the titular library being infinite and containing an infinite number of books, each of which is filled with random text. It's a variation on the infinite monkeys and typewriters and Borges uses it to ruminate on the nature of knowledge and comprehension. Umberto Eco and Gene Wolfe both referenced it, and Borges, in novels.

Here it is illustrated by Erik Desmazières.
 

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Italo Calvino was Italy's answer to Argentina's Borges and his book, Invisible Cities, is or should be required reading for every architecture student. It's structured as a series of conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in which Polo described a series of fantastical cities (all of which have the names of women). The book essentially shines Calvino's home city of Venice through a prism, splitting it into its constituent colours. Illustrations for a Folio Society edition by Dave McKean.
 

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A number of artists have had a go at Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast castle. It's a castle the size of a city that's grown over 77 generations and probably every page of the two novels in which its directly described contains the word, 'shadow.' It's fantasy but there's not a dragon or an orc in sight - the human characters are far stranger. An actor in a BBC adaptation described it as 'Dickens on crack.'

As a background, Peake's parents were missionaries to China and the castle is a gothic interpretation of the Forbidden City in Beijing in the early 20th century, along with its rigid bureaucracy and rituals. Peake was an artist himself and illsutrated it but his drawings are almost exclusively of characters.
 

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Gormenghast by Ian Miller.
 

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The Beeb adapted the first two books of the original trilogy a couple of decades back. The cast included the likes of Christopher Lee, Spike Milligan and Stephen Fry, which tells you something about its tone. The production designer was Christopher Hobbs and understanding that he was designing for television - which at the time meant relatively small and low-contrast cathode ray tubes, decided to use more light and instead of following the gothic style one would expect, came up with a more 'Tibetan' style with references to the artists Max Ernst and Paul Klee.

A new adaptation was in the works, written by Neil Gaiman. You can guess what's happened to that.
 

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Not so much a specific architectural project or a city plan but it probably fits within this thread: In his book The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps (1992), Marshall Savage argues that building floating cities above tropical oceans would be a good first step to learning how to build space colonies. These floating cities—or “arcologies” as they are sometimes called—would preferably have to be constructed near the equator, where the ocean is relatively calm.

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More commentary on the possibility of finally opening a station that was never completed to appease NIMBY's. One's whose ultimate motivation was to keep what they perceived as 'riff-raff' out, but who sadly had very deep pockets.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRwf_jdehKU
 
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Back in 1989, Maricopa County voted against an $8.4 billion rapid transit program by a 2-1 margin. It was pointed out that the transit authority itself estimated the system would reduce miles travelled by car by 2% at most. Definitely the right move.
 

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