The 7 Wildest Buildings That Were Never Built

Popular Mechanics ^ | July 9, 2018 | Tim Newcomb

[C19fan]

Picture a giant elephant with a waterfall cascading from its trunk right in the heart of Paris. Or an Antoni Gaudi work in New York City, a pyramid in Tokyo, or a mile-high Frank Lloyd Wright skyscraper among the Chicago skyline.

These architectural dreams never came to be, but that didn't stop the artists at NeoMan Studios to envision how these projects would have changed these cities. Here's a look at seven of the world’s wildest unbuilt icons and what they would like like today.

[C19fan]

I find Tatlin's Tower fascinating. There were some interesting avant garde stuff in the early Soviet Union before Socialist Realism was imposed. Is the tower even feasible?

[Artemis Webb]

bookmark

[treetopsandroofs]

The Walking City favors London, with 1960s designs from Ron Herron offering artificially intelligent mobile robotic structures that could freely roam the scorched earth, moving to resources or interconnecting with other pods for “walking metropolises.” They could then disperse as needed. Yeah, this concept was much more than 50 years ahead of its time

His walkers were at best 20 years ahead of George Lucas’.

Was half-expecting to see Babel listed.

[Lurkina.n.Learnin]

Bkmk

[dfwgator]

I liked this one....




Mr. Wiggin: This is a 12-story block combining classical neo-Georgian features with the efficiency of modern techniques. The tenants arrive here and are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort, past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily soundproofed. The blood pours down these chutes and the mangled flesh slurps into these...

Client 1: Excuse me.

Mr. Wiggin: Yes?

Client 1: Did you say 'knives'?

Mr. Wiggin: Rotating knives, yes.

Client 2: Do I take it that you are proposing to slaughter our tenants?

Mr. Wiggin: ...Does that not fit in with your plans?

Client 1: Not really. We asked for a simple block of flats.

Mr. Wiggin: Oh. I hadn't fully divined your attitude towards the tenants. You see I mainly design slaughter houses.

Clients: Ah.

Mr. Wiggin: Pity.

Clients: Yes.

Mr. Wiggin: (indicating points of the model) Mind you, this is a real beaut. None of your blood caked on the walls and flesh flying out of the windows incommoding the passers-by with this one. (confidentially) My life has been leading up to this.

Client 2: Yes, and well done, but we wanted an apartment block.

Mr. Wiggin: May I ask you to reconsider.

Clients: Well...

Mr. Wiggin: You wouldn't regret this. Think of the tourist trade.

Client 1: I'm sorry. We want a block of flats, not an abattoir.



Mr. Wiggin: ...I see. Well, of course, this is just the sort blinkered philistine pig-ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage.... You sit there on your loathsome spotty behinds squeezing blackheads, not caring a tinker's cuss for the struggling artist. You excrement,... you whining hypocritical toadies with your colour TV sets and your Tony Jacklin golf clubs and your bleeding masonic secret handshakes. You wouldn't let me join, would you, you blackballing bastards. Well I wouldn't become a Freemason now if you went down on your lousy stinking knees and begged me.

[Fiji Hill]

The Mt. Baldy Inn in Pico Rivera, Calif. The dining room looked like the interior of a cave. Back in 1960-1961, we went there frequently for their excellent Mexican food.

[treetopsandroofs]

Haha, well at least I learned a new word today: abattoir.

Pronounced like “avatar”, but with a “b” and “w”.

[ThomasThomas]

I had plans for a fort but it was too close to dinner time and my mom made me put the chairs back.

[Buckeye McFrog]

I was always partial to this hotel shaped like a ship on US 30 in Bedford County, PA.

Unfortunately it burnt to the ground in 2001.

[Yo-Yo]

And maybe one that shouldn't have been built.

[BradyLS]

How was the dancing?

[BradyLS]

? I think it looks pretty cool!

[DUMBGRUNT]

The Illinois could have housed 100,000 people moving up the mile-high tower via atomic-powered elevators

Moving up and down is about they would be doing.
After subtracting the floor space used by the elevators, emergency stairs, HVAC shafts, plumbing shafts...

Not much usable floor area for working.
Making the rent impossibly high.

And what would the transit time be for the elevators at 60 MPH - 88 Feet/Sec? How many express and local elevators? Car capacity? Tandem, triple?

100,000 people going in and out every day?

Fake building.

[upchuck]

These stories of jamming several thousand people into one building and them having such a fine quality of life that they never want to leave their building remind me of the rather strange book The World Inside by Robert Silverberg.

Preview:

Welcome to Urban Monad 116. Reaching nearly two miles into the sky, the one thousand stories of this building are home to over eight hundred thousand people living in peace and harmony. In the year 2381 with a world population of over seventy-five billion souls, the massive Urbmon system is humanity's salvation.

Life in Urbmon 116 is highly regulated, life is cherished, and the culture of procreation is seen as the highest pinnacle of god's plan. Conflict is abhorred, and any who disturb the peace face harsh punishment―even being sent "down the chute" to be recycled as fertilizer.

[Fiji Hill]

I drove through Bedford County on Rte. 30 in 2012, so I must have passed this location. In the foreground, I see a 1954 Ford that looks brand new—as did ours, when we got it in the late spring of 1954.