A review Quick to some stories I’ve come across in recent weeks about construction projects that fell by the wayside. In March we already commented on a magnificent video about aprojected motorway in London that never came to fruition.
Vancouver, for example, made the decision in the 1960s to discard the plans for the extension of urban highways planned in those years, Project 200, of which in this montage we can see how they would have turned out in the city through of the sketches. A greater historical curiosity is this video from the USSR, which shows that the artificial creation of identity is one of the great hobbies of power. The Palace of the Soviets in Moscow and about which I already commented some time ago:
“…the dictator’s plans to turn the Cathedral of Christ the Savior into thePalace of the Soviets, a building that would reflect the power of the organized people and the superiority of Stalin as the supreme leader of the people. an international competition for architects in which the most important firms of the moment participated; names such as Le Corbusier or Gropius presented their projects, finally winning the project presented by Boris Iofan. Construction began on the project but the German invasion of 1941 abruptly terminated its construction and the materials ended up being used for construction of bridges and defensive structures, thus ending the constructive dream of Stalin and his architect of power.”
On the blog Untapped New York these days they are collecting a large amount of of information on construction projects that would have changed the face of the city as we know it today, both with buildings that were never built as with bridges that were left in the drawer.
Bordering on the category of fictional cities we have this fabulous example of schizophrenia and planning ambition, a supposedly urban space dedicated to the culture of alcohol, Boozetown, with its streets “Gin Lane” or “Bourbon Boulevard”, and which weburbanist collected some time ago in a post about retro-futuristic urban design, some worthy of minds sickly and others with dictatorial minds (The architecture of poder reviews some of them), which more or less comes to the same thing.
Now we could play to imagine a reality in which motorways with hardly any use, airports without planes, ghost cities, contemporary art museums in all the provincial capitals (with the exception of Logroño, by the way, which does not have a museum) had not been built. -infrastructure but an Museo Riojano de Arte Contemporáneo extended), etc. It would have been better if many of these projects had not been carried out, but it is too late.
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