The medieval sages never saw elephants, but read Pliny’s descriptions and drew them, to then include them in picture books they called bestiaries. A bestiary of sorts, made not of animals but of unbuilt buildings, is this volume put together with the patience of monks in scriptoriums. After more dubious works, such as one on architecture in concrete and another on homes of “the world’s most creative people,” they have now compiled 300 projects of the 20th century that for some reason were never realized.
At the outset, the book elicits admiration. Not the kind prompted by a work bound to ring in our heads for a long time to come, but admiration for the painstaking selection that any good compiler can muster, and which in this case, however scant its mental echo, does have the capacity to entertain the eye, given that the atlas presented, like any atlas, is made up of images – one or two, sometimes three, per project. It is also built with words, though lack of space due to visual hypertrophy has limited the texts to brief accounts of the vicissitudes of the projects, including why they stayed on paper.
But in the admiration for this collection of icons there is also disappointment. The classification by continents and countries is not the most pertinent or adequate for a book with such a good starting theme. Geography is as valid a criterion as any other, but concepts like type, immediate context, or reason for failure might have been more fecund, and perhaps the outcome would have been less an atlas to leaf through, and more an encyclopedia for visual thinking. In the lavish deployment of pictures one perceives a certain intellectual negligence or haste, ultimately resulting in lack of hierarchy among the projects and in the redundancy and disproportion with which they are illustrated.
If the book elicits admiration tinged with disappointment, it also produces a sense of melancholy, owing to the efforts squandered on so many ideas that never went beyond plans, and into which so many architects poured their preoccupations of the moment. Skyscrapers in the Alps, cities in orbit beyond Earth’s atmosphere, mirrored ziggurats no smaller than the Giza pyramids, metropolises with Pythagorean ground plans, cavernous theaters, urbs for Morlocks under the Seine, telecom towers arousing desire, blocks shaped like DNA spirals, Babels colonized by tropical flora, the Baghdad of the Arabian Nights cloned in an Illinois prairie... The list could be as long and arbitrary as the encyclopedia Borges invented, and is indeed a sad story about efforts gone to waste, but also about architectures that remained as drawings (on purpose or not), yet eventually took on the nature (foreseen or not) of utopias. Utopias which occasionally are the seed of great ideas to come (the glass skyscraper Mies sketched in 1921), in other cases worthy architectural works in themselves (bodiless souls like the projects of a Taut, Tange, Bofill, or Fernández Alba), and most other times chimeras of megalomania that represent the errors of an epoch and give the last word to those who decided not to build them.
