Human history is littered with
incredible monuments we
stupidly tore down. But plenty didn’t even make it that far. Go digging through
dusty old ledgers and architects’ scrapbooks, and you’ll uncover a wealth of
awe-inspiring structures ripped straight out a retro sci-fi film - structures
that really never could have worked.
10. The Tokyo Tower Of
Babel
Imagine the entire height of Mount
Everest, all 8,848 meters (29,029 ft). Now imagine some lunatic had built
Dubai’s record-breaking Burj Khalifa on top of it. Congratulations: That tower
plus the mountain (10 times taller) below it combined still fall a couple
of hundred meters short of the Tokyo Tower of Babel.
The craziest building Japan never
built was dreamed up in the dying days of the bubble economy in 1991. Clocking
in at a cool 10,000 meters (around 6.2 miles), it would have taken up to 150 years to build, cost US$306
trillion and housed 30 million people. It would also been bigger than many countries. When a
comparatively tiny 4,000-meter (13,000 ft) tower was proposed around the same
time, somebody crunched the numbers for one the same size as Everest. They
concluded that a tower that large would need a base of 4,100 square kilometres
(1,500 mi2) - an area of ground nearly twice the size of Luxembourg. The base for Tokyo’s Babel would have been even
larger.
Although it was proposed during a
Japanese craze for structures bigger than mountains, it’s not clear Babel was
ever intended to be built. And by the time the architects made the proposal, the
economy was well and truly crashed.
9. The Fun
Palace
Photo credit:
Canadian Centre for
Architecture
By the late 1950s, Joan Littlewood
had already ensured her place in the history books. A British theatre director,
she was known for smashing down boundaries to make plays more accessible. But
rewriting the theatre rulebook wasn’t enough. Littlewood wanted to change the
way we saw theatres themselves.
In 1960, Littlewood hired architect
Cedric Price to design the most radical theatre in history. His Fun Palace, as
it became known, redefined what architecture could do. Taking inspiration from
cybernetics theories,
avant garde playwrights, and Monty Python, he drew up plans for a building where
nothing stayed in one place. Everything from the seats inside, to the stages, to
the lobby, to the cafe and cinema screens could be shunted around and reconfigured at will. Where the stage was one day, you might have the box office
the next. Where the changing rooms had been on Monday, you could have the
auditorium by Tuesday. No two visits would ever be the same.
If that sounds potentially confusing,
you’re not alone. People hated it. Church
groups, local citizens, and London’s councils all conspired to stop the Fun
Palace going ahead. When permission finally came through in the 1970s, funding
mysteriously dried up. Work never even started.
8. The Cenotaph For
Newton
Etienne-Louis Boullee was fascinated with Isaac Newton. A neo-classical architect working in 18th-century France, he thought the ground-breaking mathematician deserved an equally ground-breaking monument. So he sat down and drew up designs for the biggest, craziest sphere on Earth.
A 1,500-meter (500 ft) orb encased in
a sheer cylindrical base, the cenotaph would have dwarfed the Great Pyramid at
Giza. It would also have invoked a sensation of vertigo in anyone foolish enough
to visit. After climbing up a gigantic staircase, visitors would crawl through a
tiny tunnel into the inside of the orb. There, they would encounter a vast, sightless void
stretching on seemingly forever. At the very centre of this disconcerting blank
would sit a single sarcophagus containing the body of Newton, a speck against
the emptiness of the universe.
Tiny holes in the skin of the sphere
would have let pinpricks of light through in the shape of the constellations.
There were even plans to somehow create a fog effect inside the sphere, giving
everything a weird, haunted air. For reasons of practicality, the thing sadly
never got built.
7. Ivan Leonidov’s Lenin
Institute
In 1927, Ivan Leonidov was an architecture student with everything to prove. A radical Russian of the constructivist school, Leonidov wanted to make the biggest splash possible with his graduate designs. He wound up aiming far too high. His proposal for the Lenin Institute in Moscow was both breathtakingly ornate and completely unbuildable.
Designed to function as a combined
library and lecture hall, everything about Leonidov’s plans screamed “big.” The
library alone would have held 15 million books, along
with five reading rooms each capable of housing 500-1,000 visitors. Such a huge
library needed a similarly huge delivery system, so Leonidov stuffed it full of
clanking conveyor belts that whisked books skyward dozens of stories at a time.
He also included a gigantic sphere for lectures. Capable of seating 4,000, the
enormous glass orb could fold open in half and housed its own private tram
system running direct to Moscow. To top it all off, Leonidov then included a
radio station.
Although the design won Leonidov
plenty of admirers, architect Moisei Ginzburg perhaps summed it up best when he
remarked Leonidov “was not really able to prove that his constructive conundrum
was actually necessary” and called it “impossible.”
6. London’s Safety-Defying
Airports
Photo via The Architecture Foundation
If you’ve ever been to London, you’ll
know inserting an airport into the city centre is a madman’s dream. Meet that
madman: Charles W. Glover. In 1931, Glover produced designs for bringing air
travel to central London. He did it by throwing every safety regulation out the
nearest window.
Glover proposed a £5 million
wheel-shaped runway that would sit on top of thousands of homes. Stretching from Kings Cross to Trafalgar Square, it had private
garages for personal airplanes, lifts to bring people up from ground level, and
absolutely nothing to stop an incompetent pilot from careening off the end and
right into the heart of London’s shopping districts. Although the potential for
catastrophe was clearly enormous, people still took Glover seriously. A
watered-down version of the project was still being considered as late as the
1960s.
Glover wasn’t the only one to take a
cavalier approach to Londoners’ safety. A 1930s proposal suggested placing an
airport next to Westminster, where a bad crash could easily wipe out the government. Another from the 1950s aimed to place a landing platform for
personal helicopters directly above Charing Cross Station. As Popular Science blithely noted, this new landing pad
would helpfully include “radar aids for landings in London’s pea-soup
fogs.”
5. The Dynamic
Tower
In 2008, Italian architect David Fisher unveiled plans for the most ambitious construction project on Earth. Known as the Dynamic Tower, this 80-story behemoth would cost US$700 million and generate its own power using 79 wind turbines. Every single floor would rotate independently of the others, so the tower never stayed in a single shape.
The idea was to use prefab
constructions hugging tight to a central concrete core, sort of like having 80
separate bungalows stacked on top of one another. The 79 turbines would then
send juice flowing through each floor, allowing them to rotate slowly at
slightly different speeds. To someone who had never heard of the concept before,
it would seem like the Dynamic Tower was constantly shape-shifting.
With such an inspired design, you
might be wondering what happened. Officially, nothing. Fisher insists his tower
is still going ahead. However, it was originally meant to be finished in 2010,
and so far - in mid-2015 - not a single brick has been laid or a meter of land
purchased. Perhaps it doesn’t help that Fisher’s proposed site was Dubai: a city
whose construction industry hasn’t fully recovered from the 2008 banking
crash.
4. Konstantin Melnikov’s
Monument To Columbus
Eight decades before David Fisher came up with his rotating tower, Konstantin Melnikov was working on a dynamic, moving monument. Unlike Fisher, Melnikov wasn’t content with simply creating some building that shifted meaninglessly. He wanted to create one capable of playing its own musical compositions.
One of the Soviet Union’s 23 official
entries to the Pan-American competition to design a monument to Christopher
Columbus, Melnikov’s lighthouse was the definition of ambitious. Its gigantic
upper cone was hollowed out to collect rainwater that would power a small
turbine, generating electricity. More impressively, the huge wings on the side
of the building were designed to sway in the wind. As they swung back and forth,
they would strike one of seven rings, producing a distinct musical note that
could be heard for miles. On blustery days, the lighthouse would be capable of
playing intricate musical scores.
The Columbus statue itself was
equally impressive. As the lighthouse’s two cones turned, they would briefly
intersect, causing the statue to temporarily rise up into view. Too bad the
committee ultimately ditched Melnikov’s vision in favour of a big, boring block.
3. Gerard K. O’Neill’s Space
Cylinders
Photo credit:
NASA
In 1974, Princeton physicist Gerard
K. O’Neill wrote a paper that would inspire plans for years to come. Interested
in bringing humanity off Earth to inhabit the universe, O’Neill set out his designs for a vast outer space colony living
in gigantic cylinders. Known as O’Neill Cylinders, his designs
were the pinnacle of futuristic thinking.
Giant glass tubes 30 kilometres (20
mi) long, each O’Neill Cylinder would hang at the L5 point in the Moon’s orbit -
a place the Guardian described as “like a gravitational eddy where
things stay put by themselves.” Each would provide gravity by rotating, and strips of land would
alternate with long sheets of glass to let sunlight in. In effect, this meant
that people on one strip of land would always have another directly above their
heads. It would be possible to look up in the mornings and see the roof of your
neighbour's house, many thousands of feet above.
Even more impressively, each Cylinder
would come complete with its own weather system that could
be manipulated to create the sensation of passing seasons. O’Neill’s ultimate
plan was to have hundreds of these cylinders connected by a web of cables,
connecting four billion human colonists in the empty wastes of space.
Sadly for sci-fi lovers, his plans
were hundreds of years ahead of their time. Even now, 40 years later, building
an O’Neill cylinder would require technology we simply don’t have. Once again,
you failed us, future.
2. Giovanni Battista’s
Imaginary Prisons
Photo credit:
Giovanni Battista
Unlike most of the people on our
list, Giovanni Battista Piranesi never intended for his designs to be built. And
that’s a good thing because living in Piranesi’s drawings would’ve been hell on
Earth. An Italian etcher and architect (among other things) from the 18th
century, Piranesi spent his time drawing impossible prisons so horrifying that they seem
ripped straight from H.P. Lovecraft’s nightmares.
Featuring bizarre angles, staircases that lead nowhere, and rumbling machines that resemble torture devices, Piranesi’s
etchings come from the Venetian tradition of imaginary subjects. In this case,
there’s a good argument to be made that his subject was hell. The endless
corridors, slumped figures, and chains all seem to point toward people trapped
in eternal torment. That didn’t stop his admirers from seeing more earthly
possibilities in them. According to art critic Jonathan Jones, Piranesi’s
prisons directly inspired the movie architecture for Metropolis and
Blade Runner and even influenced London’s real-life Tate Modern and Jubilee Line.
1. The Utter Insanity Of
Hermann Finsterlin
Photo credit:
Herman Finsterlin
Hermann Finsterlin has an unusual
claim to fame. Despite being a visionary architect whose work inspired many, he
never saw a single building he designed actually built. There’s a good reason
for this. Finsterlin’s designs were bonkers.
We don’t mean they were unusual or
overambitious or simply too expensive to make. We mean they were the work of a
man who’d clearly parted company with rationality many moons ago. Finsterlin’s
whole approach was to make inhabitants of his buildings feel like they were
inside a living creature. He took inspiration from mammals’ limbs, the human thorax, the
alimentary canal, and dinosaurs. In one book, he claimed he wanted his rooms to
feel like separate organs, with inhabitants enjoying “the giving and receiving
symbiosis of a giant fossil womb.” At least one of his designs featured
what looks uncannily like a gigantic, erect penis.
His 3-D models were no less absurd.
One currently housed in New York’s MOMA collection resembles nothing so much as
a five-year-old’s overexcited experiments with modelling clay. The more abstract
ones don’t even seem to fit together. Yet had Finsterlin been allowed to build his designs, there’s no
doubt our world would be a much more interesting place to live in - and one a
good deal more nightmarish, too.
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