Unbuilt Architecture and City Plans

Nick Sumner said:
Never happen. It has to be built across Saudi territory. Why would they permit that when every Middle East crisis causes the oil price to spike?
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In my brutal honesty:
It's cheaper to bomb the Iranians into Stone-age, as to build that canal.
and for moment Iran government anger almost every one in world,
including India and China...
 
Toyota campus
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/0...opia-big-ideas-few-people-cameras-everywhere/

What if?

Preservation
https://phys.org/news/2026-06-technology-efforts-rome-colosseum-ipiranga.html
The same three-dimensional laser scanning technology used to monitor the Colosseum in Rome will be used in a conservation project at the Ipiranga Museum in São Paulo, Brazil. Beatriz Kuhl, a professor at the University of São Paulo's Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism (FAU-USP), presented the initiative, which is scheduled to begin in July, during FAPESP Week London, held June 2–4.
The project involves a complete scan of the museum, inside and out. The goal is to analyze the behavior of the building following the restoration work carried out in recent years, establish a monitoring system and, most importantly, create an information management model for preventive conservation purposes based on the HBIM (Historic Building Information Modeling) methodology.

HBIM is a 3D modeling process for historic buildings and sites that reproduces all the physical and functional characteristics of the structure within a three-dimensional digital simulation. It integrates technologies, processes, data, people and the history of the building.

"The idea is to feed an HBIM system with data from a specific area of the museum and then manage information about its conservation processes," Kuhl explained.

Disaster
View: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=llaJQFopLng
 
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Brett Davidson said:
Not a 'serious' plan in that no planner ever sat down and followed some sort of rationale or ideology to come up with a particular form, just 'futuristic.' San Franscisco and spaceships by Chesley Bonestell.
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As if the tides and currents aren't bad enough already around SFBay/Golden Gate.
 
Brett Davidson said:
Not a 'serious' plan in that no planner ever sat down and followed some sort of rationale or ideology to come up with a particular form, just 'futuristic.' San Franscisco and spaceships by Chesley Bonestell.

View attachment 817234
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I vastly prefer the OC suburban complex without all the potential offshore dramas, apart from a leisure trip every once in a while to Catalina Island. At 486 feet (148 meters) above sea level, we're sitting pretty with respect to anything except a biblical flooding caused by something like a near oceanic meteor impact, but I'll continue to take my chances...
 
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3rPnoFTK53qcmExyr8pJod.jpg

Le Corbusier Maison Canneel
is one of Infamous episode of Le Corbusier
the young couple Canneel got plot of land at edge of Brussels in 1929
Mr Canneel who met Le Corbusier in Architectural congress, ask him to design a small family home for that plot.

What the Canneel got was Villa with rooms for servants, a swimming pool over garage and large bill for commission.
follow by lawsuit between the two.
in end the Canneel sold there plot of land, to pay the lawyers and Le Corbusier Ego.
and Villa got never build.

source on design
https://www.fondationlecorbusier.fr...projects-canneel-house-brussels-belgium-1929/
Video in french
https://vimeo.com/145845588?fl=pl&fe=cm
 
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Michel Van said:
3rPnoFTK53qcmExyr8pJod.jpg

Le Corbusier Maison Canneel
is one of Infamous episode of Le Corbusier
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Much as I admire the works - built and unbuilt - of the classic modernists as formal exercises, I wouldn't want to live in any of them. There's correspondence between Le Corbusier and Madame Savoye and she wasn't too pleased either. The roof, like flat roofs are wont to do, leaked. Corb's reply to her complaints was, in essence 'You ungrateful b*tch, you live in a masterpiece.' He advised her to put a visitor's book by the front door and look at the famous names she'd collect.

IMG_3140.JPG
 
Brett Davidson said:
There's correspondence between Le Corbusier and Madame Savoye and she wasn't too pleased either. The roof, like flat roofs are wont to do, leaked. Corb's reply to her complaints was, in essence 'You ungrateful b*tch, you live in a masterpiece.' He advised her to put a visitor's book by the front door and look at the famous names she'd collect.
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irony today is in Mansion Savoye a visitor book to sign...

Another Infamous episode of Le Corbusier, is the house E-1027 by Ellen Gray
she design and supervised it's build
During her absence, Le Corbusier move in and painted five murals on E-1037 while being naked !
why ?
Ellen Gray criticised Le Corbusier Architecture als Living Machines and put E1037 as Alternative draft.
Jean Badovici reply to this vandalism as "a street dog marking his territory"

nude.jpg
 
Michel Van said:
irony today is in Mansion Savoye a visitor book to sign...

Another Infamous episode of Le Corbusier, is the house E-1027 by Ellen Gray
she design and supervised it's build
During her absence, Le Corbusier move in and painted five murals on E-1037 while being naked !
why ?
Ellen Gray criticised Le Corbusier Architecture als Living Machines and put E1037 as Alternative draft.
Jean Badovici reply to this vandalism as "a street dog marking his territory"
Click to expand...
What a Anchor.
 
Michel Van said:
irony today is in Mansion Savoye a visitor book to sign...

Another Infamous episode of Le Corbusier, is the house E-1027 by Ellen Gray
she design and supervised it's build
During her absence, Le Corbusier move in and painted five murals on E-1037 while being naked !
why ?
Ellen Gray criticised Le Corbusier Architecture als Living Machines and put E1037 as Alternative draft.
Jean Badovici reply to this vandalism as "a street dog marking his territory"
Click to expand...
Indeed. A great artist, but an absolute bastard. Corb died by drowning while swimming off the coast from E1037. One critic quipped that it might have been her ghost that pulled him under.

From what I have read, Christopher Wren was both a great architect and scientist, and a very agreeable person. He died in 1723.

Peter Greenaway's most accessible film is The Belly of an Architect, and it is about an architect named Stourley Kracklite, who is obsessed with the real 'paper architect' Etienne-Louis Boullée and attempts to put on an exhibition devoted to him in Rome. Interestingly, it stars Brian Dennehy, who's known for his tough guy roles but really fits his character in this film (I think that he was the perfect choice as General Leslie Groves in HBO's Day One too). Kracklite is an artist utterly devoted to his work and contemptuous of anyone who doesn't share his passion. I had a professor almost exactly like him and even chose him to supervise my Master's thesis.

The film looks great, but you'll spend most of it thinking, 'What an a-[bleep]!'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Belly_of_an_Architect
 
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A couple of thoughts:

My father played cornet in church-school band during foundation ceremony for Liverpool's Catholic cathedral.
Of course, given WW2's Blitz and significant population shift to 'New Towns' beyond the 'capture' zone, subsequent completion became utterly impracticable.
( Let's not forget that belated replacement, the 'Funnel', was beset by leaks, leaks and yet more leaks until recent repairs.)

Atlantis ? Well, we now know it was not in the Atlantic, the submarine geology is simply wrong, wrong, wrong.
Set against that, there was a thriving, sea-faring Neolithic / Early Bronze age culture on the Atlantic coast, wedged between Atlas and Anti-Atlas ranges. Land access was minimal due mountains and desert. In effect, it was a semi-circular-ish island, 'Beyond The Pillars Of Hercules'

As sea-farers, they were well placed to trade North up the Atlantic coast for Cornwall's tin and Great Orme's copper. South beyond Saharan fringe. And, accustomed to Atlantic weather, their craft would have had no problems with the milder Med.....

But, IIRC, at some stage, the locals just abandoned the place.
My guess is that their two ranges' snow-packs finally thawed. Water table progressively failed, drought set in...
Another possibility is that a middling earth-quake deranged local aquifers. with the same but more sudden effect.
Exit unto Legend...
 
Michel Van said:
3rPnoFTK53qcmExyr8pJod.jpg

Le Corbusier Maison Canneel
is one of Infamous episode of Le Corbusier
the young couple Canneel got plot of land at edge of Brussels in 1929
Mr Canneel who met Le Corbusier in Architectural congress, ask him to design a small family home for that plot.

What the Canneel got was Villa with rooms for servants, a swimming pool over garage and large bill for commission.
follow by lawsuit between the two.
in end the Canneel sold there plot of land, to pay the lawyers and Le Corbusier Ego.
and Villa got never build.

source on design
https://www.fondationlecorbusier.fr...projects-canneel-house-brussels-belgium-1929/
Video in french
https://vimeo.com/145845588?fl=pl&fe=cm
Click to expand...
Villa Arpel featured in Tati's Mon Oncle came spontaneously to mind...
 
Great hotels are spaces into which visitors can project alternative lives; places that allow us to be versions of ourselves that others don’t. How hoteliers conjure these institutions out of thin air when much of our desires lay hidden is another matter. The great hotels of the 20th century may have been built in a dawning era of media and advertising, as city populations rapidly expanded, but they were created without the market research and focus groups that the contemporary hospitality industry relies on.

As a consequence, they were often stabs-in-the-dark or the fantasies of those who built and managed them, extravagant ideas of businessmen which, when successful, tapped into the latent urges of an increasingly wealthy and dynamic urban population. Dealing in dreams, though, is a dicey business, and these unbuilt hotels showed how wild the imagining was – and how very wide of the mark it could often be.
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The magnificent, mind-bending hotels that never were
 
Not so much an unbuilt as unfinished.....has anyone seen how the carriageways for horse drawn carriages on Brunel's Thames Tunnel would have looked?
 

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