Unbuilt

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Canadian entrepreneur Michael Henderson thought of an out-of-this-world idea in 2002. He envisioned a 250-acre resort on the Vegas Strip complete with a lunar-themed aquatic center, a mall, a biosphere and even moon buggy rides. Other ideas included a crater pool with water slides, a glass underwater walking area, rock climbing wall, a bar with a two-story waterfall, a winter sports-themed area and a vineyard. To be called Moon World Resort, it would have featured 10,000 rooms and cost $5 billion dollars.

 

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COOP HIMMELB(L)AU’S Sky-Arc / Sci-Arc – 24 hour Living, Culture and Arts District (Los Angeles)

 

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In the mid-imperialist flush of the 1800s, a Londoner named Thomas Wilson decided it was about time the city had its very own Egyptian-style pyramid mausoleum, perched atop Primrose Hill (the highest point in the city). It was to be “sufficiently capacious to receive 5,000,000 of the dead”.

 

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In 2004, artist Thomas Hirschhorn was invited to create an “enterable” project in Minneapolis as part of Walker without Walls, the series of programs we presented around town during construction of our new facility. He came up with a Road Side Giant of his own — a 50-foot tall replica of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The massive tome was to be installed along Lake Street in south Minneapolis and would’ve housed a library of philosophy texts, the production center for a daily philosophy newspaper he and philosopher Marcus Steinweg were to create, a meeting and exhibition space, and, outside, a cafe. The project unfortunately outgrew its budget and was never realized.

 

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The first Apple Phone was conceived and got as far as the prototype stage in 1983. Before the Macintosh. The Apple Phone had a graphical user interface with a touchscreen. It also had a built-in checkbook program that was intended to allow users to use an early form of online checking. It had an address book as well, which would allow users to scroll through a phone list, click with the stylus, and place a phone call.

 

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The Angel City Development Project was designed as an entertainment complex and landmark attraction for the public and visiting tourists of the downtown Los Angeles area. As Brett’s vision the project would incorporate shopping centers, cinemas, museums, hotels, lush gardens, and various showcases. The tower and its surrounding buildings were designed to stand on a 122 acre site which Brett and his City of Angel’s corporation collected and acquired over the course of 2 years. The unique architecture of Angel City incorporates monumental concrete, granite, and stainless steel flying buttresses inspired by great historic European gothic cathedrals. These elements are merged with an original modern structure making it the first of its kind in the world and a uniquely original creation. Due to an eminent domain lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles School Board, the project’s land is no longer available to construct the grand Angel City development.

 

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In 2016 developer Dacra unsuccessfully proposed a small retail building at 4039 NE 42st Avenue, Miami, designed by Chad Oppenheim. It was called Stardust East.

 

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These are the only known photos of these unproduced prototypes for toys that were never released.

 

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Port Disney (Long Beach, CA)

 

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Steven Holl, an American architect, first proposed the idea of a bike lane between two skyscrapers at the mouth of one of Copenhagen’s harbors in 2008. After much discussion among city planners and architects, the project was finally cancelled in 2015.

 

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It’s 1967. Desmond Plummer and the GLC’s abandoned plan for a monorail on Regent Street. It was just going to go overhead. It looks kind of very stylized to that era, but it says a lot that space was prime real estate. They wanted to hang on to as much pavement space as possible. They didn’t want to extend the roads. They wanted to build there, so they thought let’s just cram in as much as we can. Let’s have a monorail, let’s take things above.

 

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Luckman and Alexander’s star-shaped Hollywood Museum atop Griffith Park (Lo Angeles)

 

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1951 Buick Le Sabre

 

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In 2008, Zaha Hadid won an international competition for the proposed art museum, Vilnius Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, in Lithuania’s capital Vilnius. Hadid’s proposal was a “mystical object, hovering over spindled artificial landscape strip” that contrasted with the verticality of surrounding skyscrapers. The museum was initially scheduled to open in 2011, however was terminated due to allegations of corruption.

 

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Phare du Monde was due to be an observation tower at Paris’s 1937 World Fair (tagline: “Pleasure Tower Half Mile High”). It would have been half a mile high, with a restaurant, sun lounge and beacon at the top, and a bizarre spiral road channelling cars up to a parking garage at the top of the tower.

 

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Western Rivers Expedition, intended for Florida’s Walt Disney World, was going to be Frontierland’s version of Pirates of the Caribbean.

 

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Resembling the nest of an insect, the Dystopian Farming project by Eric Vergne, proposed to built along the Skyline Park in Manhattan would have combined farms, worker housing and market places, mixing politically opposing classes – farmers and urban consumers.

 

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Rome Central Train Station

 

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In 1999, Pepsi and George Lucas decided to get together and release some Star Wars themed items together. Unfortunately, the deal fell through. Years later, a few pieces of concept art were leaked out.

 

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9/11 Memorial designed by Jonathan Cape: “All…victims…are represented by an array of wires…connected to the bedrock of the site and at the other end to a series of steel columns. These wires will also attach to a grass ground plane floating at street level. The wires will express a degree of tension by deforming these columns into a wide variety of forms…and by pulling the ground plane into a variety of folds. Placed between each column are a series of fabric veils which will billow in the winds…and are a metaphoric expression of the souls of the victims. The columns will peel away from a large glass plane upon which are inscribed the place and dates of various atrocities that have occurred in the last century; the wires and veils will be symbolically using the deaths of the victims as a means of exposing other atrocities and will remember the countless unidentified victims of past events in our shared global community.”

 

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The Threatening Shadow. Designed for the New York World’s Fair, 1939.

 

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Victor Gruen, the architect best-known as the inventor of the modern shopping mall, almost built a giant housing development on what is currently called Roosevelt Island. The project would have comprised a 22 ft tall, two-level platform with a series of 8 to 50-story apartment towers. Responding to mass housing shortages, the project would have accommodated up to 70,000 people.

 

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The Dragonfly was an urban farm concept for New York City’s Roosevelt Island, modeled after the wings of a dragonfly and designed to provide fresh, local food within an urban environment. Fruit, vegetables, grains, meat and dairy would have been produced on the Dragonfly’s 132 floors and the entire structure would be powered by a combination of solar and wind power.

 

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In 1987 toy maker LJN they planned on turning vicious killers into kid-friendly squirt toys with these Freddy Krueger and Jason water guns. Freddy made it to the prototype stage, while only concept art for the Jason gun was produced. From the looks of the vendor catalog image above, it appears as if Freddy’s gun was supposed to shoot water from his mouth, while pushing down on Jason’s arms would unleash a torrent of water from the head of his trusty axe.

 

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Florida’s Disney World needed a roller coaster on par with California’s Matterhorn. Mount Fuji was planned to be that coaster, deep in the heart of Epcot’s Japan Pavillion. It was said that it was scrapped to avoid a conflict of interest with Kodak, one of the parks main advertising partners. Allegedly they viewed Mount Fuji as a permanent advertisement for their competitor, Fuji Film.

 

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Architect Joseph Urban’s rejected 1926 proposal for the Metropolitan Opera House (NYC)

 

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Imagine what the NYC waterfront would have been like if Samuel Friede’s gargantuan 1906 Coney Island Globe had made it past the cornerstone laying stage. Measuring 300 feet in diameter and 750 feet tall, the bulbous, truss-supported 11-story tower was to be topped with huge spotlights and would have contained a theater, roller-skating rink, dance hall, circus, palm garden, weather observatory, several restaurants and a roof garden.

 

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Proposed extensions to the White House in Washington DC, 1891-1901

 

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The complicated case of the Museum Tower and the adjacent Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas was at one point to be resolved by installing a 400-foot sun-responsive sculpture-design proposal by architecture firms REX and Front. The large Surya sculpture would have shielded Nasher Sculpture Center from the Museum Tower’s intense reflection by expanding its light-sensitive panels as flowers.

 

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Difficulties plagued the project from Day 1 and costs began to escalate. Fourth Grace was cancelled in 2004. (Liverpool)

 

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“We were supposed to have a new national library built by Jan Kaplicky in Prague. Never happened and the guy died.”

 

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Moving sidewalks probably sounded like a civilized solution to the increasingly congested New York City of the 19th century: to ease crowded streets, “moving sidewalks” or “moving platforms” would be built underground. The idea was first proposed in 1871. Widely debated in newspapers at the time, it went no where: Mayor Seth Low killed the project. But it popped back up again around 1910, this time as a network of moving sidewalks at a top speed of about 10 miles per hour that would replace the new subway system.

 

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The Dubai Towers Dubai was a four-tower complex to be built in the city of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The developer, Sama Dubai, intended it to form the centerpiece of The Lagoons, a megaproject located on Dubai Creek which was to consist of seven islands. The towers would have between 57 to 94 stories, and although the heights of each are not known, it is believed the tallest would top 400 meters (1,310 ft) while two others would rise beyond 300 meters (980 ft). Due to the economic downturn in Dubai, the project was killed.

 

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In 2005 toy manufacturer NECA planned to release an action figure based on the remake of “The Ring”. The set was to feature a figure of Samara along with two different display bases: a TV set and a well, the two things that Samara can most often be found emerging from. The figure was going to come apart at the waist, allowing us to either display her in front of the well or split her in half and have her coming out of the TV. The hair was even going to be flexible, allowing those two different poses to really come to life. But NECA was unable to acquire the proper licensing to actually release the set.

 

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The Geyser Mountain attraction was originally intended to be placed in the Frontierland area of Disneyland. The storyline was that the guests would ride a drilling machine where they encounter a geyser. This would toss the riders up and down, Tower of Terror style.

 

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Vincent G. Raney’s 1945 design for a United Nations complex in San Francisco’s Twin Peaks neighborhood. San Francisco was a candidate for the U.N. Headquarters but lost out to New York.

 

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Frank Gehry’s new Guggenheim Museum (NYC)

 

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Milwaukee’s “Tourist Tower” was to be 875 feet tall, taller than any building in the world outside of New York City. A slender center core would be fitted seven circular “exhibition areas” with an external, iron latticework helping to support the weight of each floor. Inside the core, glass elevators would zip from the ground level to the rooftop observation deck in two minutes. Other exhibition levels would include a revolving beer garden, an artificial stream where guests could go trout fishing, a complete and working dairy farm, and a restaurant where food would be served to guests on trays as they sat in airline seats, facing out at the landscape – “to give those persons who have never flown in a plane an opportunity to sample airline service,” explained Rasche. Backers of the project estimated it would draw as many as 1 million people to Milwaukee every year.

 

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New York architect Eytan Kaufman’s Sky Bridge Hotel in Abu Dhabi was going to be a 264-room hotel suspended in a blimp-like structure over a bridge that connected the main island to Lulu Island. Financial pressures pushed this design into the trash can.

 

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In 1964 the radical architecture group Archigram created Walking City and imagined a future in which borders and boundaries are abandoned in favor of a nomadic lifestyle among groups of people worldwide. Inspired by NASA’s towering, mobile launch pads, hovercraft, and science fiction comics, Archigram envisioned buildings that travel on land and sea to meet up for parties.

 

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In 1758, Charles Ribard designed an elephant to grace to the Champs-Élysées in the spot where the Arc de Triomphe now stands. It consisted of three levels, to be built in the shape of an elephant, with entry via a spiral staircase in the underbelly. The building was to have a form of air conditioning, and furniture that folded into the walls. A fountain — or perhaps the plumbing — was to flow from the elephant’s trunk.

 

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Super Mario’s Wacky Words would have been a direct continuation of Super Mario World. It was slated for a release on Phillips’ CD-I system. Some heavy work was done on this game before development was shut down due to the CD-I not being able to bring in the money. Three prototype discs are said to be in circulation and the game itself managed to at least reach Alpha stage. As it is a pre-alpha, the prototype is rather limited; Super Mario can only walk both ways and jump, and no powerups exist. He cannot slide or swim, but it would appear that these abilities would have been implemented had development continued.

 

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The Fun Palace was one of architect Cedric Price’s most influential projects and inspired Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s early 1970s project, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Using an unenclosed steel structure, fully serviced by travelling gantry cranes the building comprised a ‘kit of parts’: pre-fabricated walls, platforms, floors, stairs, and ceiling modules that could be moved and assembled by the cranes. Virtually every part of the structure was variable. “Its form and structure, resembling a large shipyard in which enclosures such as theatres, cinemas, restaurants, workshops, rally areas, can be assembled, moved, re-arranged and scrapped continuously,” promised Price.

 

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Stanley Tigerman’s Instant City, 1965, proposed a city where prism-shaped offices sheltered grand expressways, leaving wide swatches of green space open to the public.

 

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Like a lot of people at the end of 2001 and beginning of 2002, artist/architect Vito Acconci made a hypothetical proposal for a building to replace the World Trade Center. His reasoning was that if buildings get exploded we could make them already exploded.

 

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In 2008, post-structuralist French architecture firm R&Sie(n) hoped to create a new research station and museum called Waterflux whose strange shape would have suggested ice caves – or the guts of a living thing.

 

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After Alcatraz was a prison and before it was a tourist attraction—Native Americans occupied the island in an effort to claim it as their own, in response to their own land being forcibly taken away by the government. Architect Donald MacDonald proposed this plan for the Alcatraz Center for Indian Life, which included a cultural center, school, museum, council chambers, and shops.

 

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Four Dutch designers—Chris Collaris, Ruben Esser, Sander Bakker and Patrick van der Gronde— envisioned a sustainable design of re-use for a discarded oil tanker as a city in the Southern Gulf Region, which they entitled The Black Gold.

 

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The Santa Monica Causeway

 

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In 1995, Peter Neville, an architect working for Japan’s Taisei Corporation, dreamed up the X-Seed 4000, a 2.5-mile high steel skyscraper in the shape of Mount Fuji that would have been situated in Tokyo. In fact, the X-Seed 4000 was designed to be slightly taller than Japan’s largest mountain. Neville’s futuristic environment could accommodate 500,000 to 1,000,000 inhabitants, who would zip around the 800-floor structure on MagLev trains. The X-Seed 4000 would have cost over $1 trillion to build.

 

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In the Mojave Desert you’ll find California City, a city famous for dreaming big. A huge chunk of it is gridded roads—complete with names, speed limits, and GPS driving directions—with nothing built on the vast majority of those plots. Incorporated in 1965, California City is a living contradiction. Today it’s a working community with roughly 15,000 residents. But it’s simultaneously enormous, having been planned at a scale to rival Los Angeles. The city has over 200 square miles of land.

 

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Though never released, The Car Game got close enough to production that print ads were in circulation. Based upon the relatively obscure 1977 movie The Car, in which a car) goes on a murderous rampage, the game looked as if it would actually be rather a lot of fun. Basically: position The Car at the top of the ramp, and – if it rolls down on your turn – you lose or win dependent on how much debris is knocked out of its path. That’s all well and good, but in the movie that debris was usually made out of living, breathing, people.

 

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Due to Robert Young’s untimely death, this re-imagination of Grand Central was never realized. The newly elected chairman of the New York Central Railroad chose architect I.M. Pei to design the new station, which was released in 1954. Pei’s “Hyperboloid” was a 1,497-foot-tall office tower and transit hub that would cost approximately $100 million and span 108 stories. The proposed nine-acre site would have been the the world’s tallest and most expensive structure. Young died in 1958 and the project was scrapped.

 

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In this never-built Disneyland attraction guests would have walked right into the mouth of an oversized version of the Crocodile from “Peter Pan.” Then — by walking down a set of steps (Which supposedly put Disneyland visitors down inside the croc’s belly!) — they could then peer out plate glass windows at a colorful collection of tropical fish.

 

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Atlantropa was the brainchild of the German architect Herman Sörgel, who tirelessly promoted his project from 1928 until his death in 1952. His experience of World War I, the economic and political turmoil of the 1920s and the rise of Nazism in Germany convinced Sörgel that a new world war could only be avoided if a radical solution was found to European problems of unemployment, overpopulation and, with Saudi oil still a decade away, an impending energy crisis. With little faith in politics, Sörgel turned to technology. Dams across the Strait of Gibraltar, the Dardanelles, and eventually between Sicily and Tunisia, each containing gigantic hydroelectric power plants, would form the basis for the new supercontinent. In its final state the Mediterranean would be converted into two basins, with the western part lowered by 100 meters and the eastern part by 200 meters and a total of 660,200 km2 of new land reclaimed from the sea – an area larger than France.

 

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Arakawa and Madeline Gins’ HOTEL REVERSIBLE DESTINY provides you with a meditative architectural context within which to demonstrate and explore your full range of capabilities, not only those generally accepted as part of the human repertoire but also still nascent ones. Through practicing architectural meditation within HOTEL REVERSIBLE DESTINY, visitors will come to know what makes a person tick, the ins and outs of human – and transhuman! – behavior. This architectural meditation site will before you know it have you “talking” for your great benefit with your own genes. HOTEL REVERSIBLE DESTINY makes you as adept at perspicuous bodily thinking as are birds in the sky and fish in the sea, but considerably more so.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Charalampos Tzanakis, Hope you enjoy it. I think my favorite LCTG sequence is the third one, if I had to choose. The deleted scene was originally an extension of that scene that we ended up thinking was unnecessary. I can imagine Zurn having that influence. How cool. ** Tosh Berman, Loy was a Dodger fan? They already existed back then? If I were a real fan, I would know the answer to that question. It’s a really unique and weirdly stylish or stylishly weird novel. I think you’d really like it. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Ha ha, thanks. I topped the slaves! No, buying things for myself in any circumstance is one of my least favorite things to do in the world. I suppose I might treat myself to an unusually interesting meal or something. And I guess my portion of the Buche cost will be kind of a self-gift. Do or will you buy yourself a nice Xmas gift? You most certainly deserve one. ‘Hangry’, ha ha. That is a seriously horrible word. Wow. If someone used it around me, I don’t even know what I would do. Something not dignified. Love making every store of every kind everywhere in the world sell every variety of Pocky, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I hope you like it. It’s very chewy in in the good way. ** Bill, Hi, B. It’s pretty fucking good, man, I think. Ah, I spaced. I’m glad it (the gig) went so well, and I’m sad if the video isn’t up to speed, but I know that can be. It’s good I have wild imagination. And fingers crossed re: the off chance you think it’s salvageable. I don’t think I know the work of Christine Choy. I’ll go correct that. ** CAUTIVOS, Thank you about the post. ‘Shy’ really holds up, I think. I read it again not so long ago, and it still seems really amazing. It took me a while to be okay with that cucumber cover. Not my pick, needless to say. But I get the charm. Thank you for everything, and a salute from France and me to you and yours. ** Steve Erickson, I don’t think I know Sault unless I’m blanking. I’ll find and try the Little Simz album. We’re supposed to get a very initial budget this evening. It’ll need to be heavily refined once we have a shooting schedule and shot list and stuff, but it’ll be an important indicator. Best guess at the moment is the next trip to LA will happen somewhere between Jan 5 and 10. I’ll find Johnny Truant’s channel. I looked at ok.ru initially, and I couldn’t mistake heads or tails of it. Thank you! ** tomk, Hi, Tom. Well, the novel is strangely under-discussed considering. I think you’ll get into it. I hope the Peru trip wipes away the worn out quality. It seems intense there at the moment, no? Commiserations galore on any possible jet lag that ends up hitting you on the other side. Hugs from me! ** Jeff J, Hi. It’s really terrific novel. Her prose is so constantly on its tippy-toes. Curious sounds there on the upcoming EP. Nice. I’ll let you know re: ‘Aftersun’. Any film that has Tilda Swinton in it needs to have a big other allure for me to want to see it. And two roles sounds like a total dealbreaker. I think the only Joanna Hogg film I’ve seen is ‘Archipelago’, and I don’t remember it blowing me away whatsoever. Why, do you like her stuff? I’m totally crushed about Bookforum. That is really, really sad news. I think it was far and away the best lit magazine in the US. One of the very few things I craved and read cover to cover. I assume it’s been killed because it’s a money loser by Artforum’s new owner. I do want to check in with my Editorials friends at AF and get the accurate scoop. But, yeah, that’s very bad news for lit and for all of us writers who try to write towards the sun and moon. ** Misanthrope, That’s quite a little problem. My keyboard is fucked up and won’t type an ‘x’ unless I push down really hard on the key. Very annoying. ‘X’ happens to come up quite a lot. Who’d have thunk. Awesome about the return of the remote. Yeah, I’ll skip ‘Bones and All’. I don’t have a boner for Chalamet, and that director’s earlier films are ugh to me, so that’s that. I should get that/those new McCarthys. Mental note. Well, you showed her! Or your body did! But you’re in charge of your body, obviously, so, no, you showed her! I’m good, but I’m not warm. ** Robert, I don’t consciously try to max out the blog readers’ bank accounts, but I suppose that is the collateral damage. I don’t know ‘Aliss at the Fire’, no. I’ll investigate. Joshua Tree is sweet. The park, that is. Especially on mushrooms. I guess the town itself is sweet too. A bit odd. So not on mushrooms. I can imagine putting something in order could seduce sleep. Something non-stressful to put in order. Hm. When I was in high school there was a point when it became super trendy to become Born Again, and all my friends were getting baptised and stuff. Lasted about a month and a half as I recall. ** Okay. I haven’t made one of these posts in quite a while, so I did. Because they’re kind of fun, no? See you tomorrow.