Exceptional Architectural Projects That Never Came to Life

Although many architectural marvels have gained popularity in recent years, a significant number of ambitious projects were never executed. These unbuilt structures offer a glimpse into an alternate architectural innovation and creativity world.

(Photo : Pexels/Johannes Plenio)

Paris Art Centre Egg Design

André Bruyère, a radical French architect, submitted a concept for a giant ovoid tower during the 1969 competition for the Paris Art Center. Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano ultimately won the contest by installing a from-within symphony of pipework. With its walls swelled out in a curving rebuttal to the tyranny of the straight line, his bulbous building would have risen one hundred meters above the city streets. It would have been clothed in dazzling alabaster, glass, and concrete scales.

As Bruyère predicted, time will transform into an oval shape, following the egg, rather than being linear, like the straight streets and tall skyscrapers. A monorail would penetrate the structure's facade and traverse it toward a sinuous floating ribbon, while his sacred Oeuf would be raised overhead on three robust legs. As if it were a yolk, the atrium was supposed to be shaped like an encapsulated globe. However, it was reportedly not meant to be. Paris received its high-tech homage to plumbing instead of his vocational poetry, which failed to impress the judges.

Palace of the Soviets

Constructing buildings in Soviet Russia were among the most ambitious and eye-catching structures ever created. It was inevitable that the Palace of the Soviets would be a modernist marvel, given that Moscow was the center of modern architecture at the time. A competition for the design of the Palace was organized in 1931, when Stalin was in power, to construct an administrative structure and a congress hall that was to be located close to the Kremlin. Construction began in 1937 and was halted in 1941 due to the German invasion of Russia, which initiated World War II. Sadly, history had other ideas for the construction project, and the materials were repurposed for the development of the bridge.

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Manhattan Dome

In the history of architectural designs, the Manhattan Dome stands out as one of the most peculiar and unorthodox structures ever intended. Shoji Sadao and Buckminster Fuller were the ones who came up with the idea of a glass dome that would encompass the entire upper Manhattan skyscraper metropolis and run from 62nd Street down to 22nd Street. In addition to regulating the weather, the dome was designed to lessen the amount of pollutants in the air. Moreover, the outrageous concept of the dome being built over Manhattan never made it off the drawing board and came dangerously close to being constructed. According to Fuller, the most successful failure in the planet's history was his design idea, which has yet to reach its optimal stage.

Art Museum Strongoli

From this vantage point, it is easy to infer that Frank Gehry was the architect responsible for the ribboned building covered in silver steel. The well-known starchitect did have a significant role in the conception of the Art Museum Strongoli, even though this needs to be more accurate. Following the phenomenal success of the Guggenheim Bilbao, the authors state that art museums started to give significant thought to their buildings and the art they housed within them. This structure, created by Coop Himmelbau in 2006 and strategically placed on a hilltop in Strongoli, Italy, was intended to serve not just as a museum but also as a destination in its own right. Similar to several other structures, its non-construction can be primarily attributed to financial constraints.

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