Legendary but never built: 10 unrealized masterpieces of architecture

Its floor plan is featured on the cover of Modern Architecture Since 1900 by William J. R. Curtis, who describes it as a web of lines that seemed to gradually expand towards an implicit infinity or lead distant views towards the internal heart of the building. An icon of the modern idea of the relationship with grounds and landscapes, its wall planes were interrupted only to make way for full-height glass openings. The inspiration comes from the neoplastic paintings of Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, with a vision of architecture as a work of art. Its plan and section would later visibly resonate in the Barcelona Pavilion of 1928.

Born from the post-war confidence in the future and a desire to explore the new technological potential in architecture, the building was designed to be one mile high, about 1,600 meters. Wright introduced it in his book "A Testament", published in 1957, challenging heights that remain unimaginable even today, nearly twice the height of the record-holding Burj Khalifa, while in Milan, the Torre Velasca and the Pirelli Tower were being built. The issue of wind-induced oscillations was to be countered by its tripod structure, but to this day, there is no evidence of its feasibility, nor of the effectiveness of the 75 elevators planned in terms of circulation and safety.

Le Corbusier's Venice Hospital, roughly coeval with Milan's Olivetti Electronic Computing Cente, which shares a similar fate, is a milestone in the history of modern architecture. On one hand, it reinterprets the built fabric of Venice in a contemporary way, with a layout of interconnected but potentially independent cells; on the other, it develops an innovative solution for care units, with a section that allows zenithal light to enter and L-shaped dividers to separate the beds. The architectural approach differs from that of his contemporaries, Mies and Wright: it is pragmatic, working within the broad but defined boundaries of construction feasibility. After Le Corbusier's death in 1965, the project passed to his firm but ultimately came to nothing.

The competition for the new headquarters of the second most important newspaper in the United States attracted 260 proposals, including the giant column by Adolf Loos, the author of Ornament and Crime, which caused enormous and long-lasting controversy. Some, like Manfredo Tafuri, saw it as a linguistic decontextualization foreshadowing Pop; others interpreted it as an ironic translation of the idea of a newspaper column. Paradoxically, however, this oversized ornamental element reveals a nearly bare aesthetic by the standards of the time, and since then, it has continued to exert significant influence on generations of architects.

The photomontage of the "street in the air" presented among the drawings for the Golden Lane housing complex competition made history in residential architecture. It stems from a line of thought that runs through the 20th century: the distribution space of the corridor as a space for socialization, designed for collective use like an elevated street. We see this concept in many residential buildings, from Brinkman's Spangen complex to BIG's 8-House, and Le Corbusier's rues intérieures. However, this dream of blending public and private spaces solely through the architecture of the building often clashed with the improper use of such spaces.

OMA's proposal for the Parc de La Villette is a manifesto project that makes explicit a working method. Architectural specificity and programmatic indeterminacy go hand in hand, resulting in a project that is resolved more through process than form. It is a design where various elements—the strips, the confetti (or points on a grid), and circulation—are held together by a final layer. These are marks and patterns that overlap across the park's surface, concentrating on strategic points meant to function as social condensers, magnets for a new "horizontal congestion" that finds its main source of vitality in the heterogeneity of forms and urban populations.

The matrix was a mosaic of memory fragments, which were not meant to reassemble into traditional urban forms, but to reinterpret discontinuity in a city scarred by wartime and political atrocities, like Berlin. A series of lines, the "ten lightning bolts of absolute absence," both theoretical and functional, intersected to become a framework for colliding new, differently angled volumes. Rem Koolhaas, a juror in the Potsdamer Platz competition, criticized the jury itself for its conscious "massacre of architectonic imagination," praising Libeskind instead for a project that represented a powerful attempt to re-imagine the very idea of a center, despite all the forces that had eroded the concept.

It was the idea of a gigantic plaza, 520 meters in diameter, surrounding the Castello Sforzesco, to house what could today be called a business center. The Doric colonnade was intended to host the new republican government, with other buildings for administration and public use, giving a recognizable shape to the new public heart of Milan, strategically located along the Sempione axis connecting France and Via Emilia. The French administration, finding the project too radical and expensive, eventually shelved it. However, the idea resurfaced eighty years later with the construction of the semicircular road flanked by grand buildings in the Beruto Plan.

The Hotel Attraction was a proposal by Antoni Gaudí for a skyscraper in Lower Manhattan, New York City. Commissioned in May 1908, it was intended to reach 360 meters in height. However, doubts about the project's feasibility have always accompanied its famous drawings. Little is known about its origins, and the project remained unknown until 1956, when it appeared in the documents of some of Gaudí's collaborators. Reflecting the enduring allure of this idea, the drawings for the Hotel Attraction have even been proposed as a basis for the reconstruction of Ground Zero in Manhattan.

Zumthor's design for the new documentation and exhibition center on the site of the former Gestapo headquarters won first prize in the 1993 competition. It is a long, boxy building that deliberately leaves the urban situation in suspense, covering the remains of the SS building and integrating them into a new exhibition system with exposed functional structures and elements, without cladding or ornamentation. From the outset, the budget was insufficient, and the group of historians responsible for the narratives of the past viewed the site more as a container than as a historical element in itself, requesting more elaborate installations. Zumthor, on the other hand, envisioned providing visitors with a direct experience of the places where the SS atrocities occurred. This led to delays, interruptions, and failures, culminating in a new competition organized by the municipality, which resulted in the construction of the current building.