André Bruyère: Centre Pompidou

Did you know that, if things had gone differently, the Pompidou Centre could have been an egg? In the 1969 competition for the Paris art centre – ultimately won by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, with their inside-out symphony of pipework – a radical French architect called André Bruyère submitted a proposal for a gigantic ovoid tower. His bulbous building would have risen 100 metres above the city’s streets, clad in shimmering scales of alabaster, glass and concrete, its walls swelling out in a curvaceous riposte to the tyranny of the straight line.

L’Oeuf de Pompidou is one of many astonishing schemes to feature in Atlas of Never Built Architecture (Phaidon)...

The Guardian: How the world could have looked: the most spectacular buildings that were never made