The ones that didn't make it

[Thin White Duke 4,072]

After browsing the sad topic called "The ones that didn't make it to the STEX", about planned BATs that didn't quite make it to the public. Then started browsing the interweb for planned projects around the world that didn't happen. Well, when I say "around the world", what I actually mean is "Around Sweden", but never mind. This is a thread to post obituaries to lost greatness. Let's begin with some of my favorite picks from Sweden, or more specifically, Stockholm.

First up, Thor's Towers. I love that name. Originally supposed to be taller and look completely different, they were scaled down and replanned because city residents thought the original suggestion was (this is incredible) too boring. I admit these look a million times better though, so I won't complain. Now people are instead saying they're too ugly. Yippie-ki-yay.

And then, Tellus Tower. A pinnacle (quite literally) in architecture. At a planned 270m tall, it's supposed to become the tallest building in Sweden and 23rd tallest Residential building in the world (2nd in Europe). The plans are still being tossed around, but knowing the swedish people's taste for previous modern architecture propositions, I have a feeling where this might be heading.

I know I'm making hasty premonitions here, but I have good reasons. As one strong example, here's the previously planned new building for Stockholm's central station.

Right before construction was to begin in late 2010, someone said "You know what, this looks too good" and now instead there'a black box. There's also this.

Slussen! The pride of Stockholm. The first cloverleaf interchange in Europe, at completion in the 1930's it was made to fill in it's duties several times over, have the capacity to handle three times as much traffic as it usually did on a normal day. Eighty years later however, that figure has changed. It now has to deal with around three times more traffic than it was originally made for, and that's on a good day. Politicians keep saying it needs to be updated, but ask the people and that's a no-no. "It's a cultural heritage, you know! We must preserve this honestly very ugly junction at all price. I shall do what I can by complaining about Stockholm't traffic situation until they come up with a better solution!"

That's Sweden for you. Highly modern right-wing country in every aspect apart from city development. 

[9gruntsand1hammer 3,194]

One of my favourite projects in Toronto that was cancelled just over a year ago. 2 Queen West, 65 Floors, 220m.

 

  Edited July 8, 2015 by 9gruntsand1hammer  

[Odainsaker 2,134]

Arquitectonica boldly offered the striking Horizon Hill Center for San Antonio, Texas, in 1982:

Three 45-story office towers and one hotel/condominum tower all joined atop a megamall...hey, it was the '80s!  However, 1982 was also the low point of the Reagan Recession, and this overly ambitious proposal collapsed.  Though planned to be located out in the inner suburbs near the airport, where it would require changes to FAA building height restrictions, this would have been the tallest building in the city and perhaps the most monumentally dramatic modern tower in Texas.  Thirty years later, Arquitectonica would design the Grand Hyatt San Antonio, a far more conservatively modest project.

 

However, the Horizon Hills might still have been overshadowed by the Alamo Heroes Monument, an 802-foot high landmark proposed in 1912 for Alamo Plaza in front of the historic Alamo shrine.

Eat your heart out, Santa Anna!  In 1912, this new Wonder of the World would have been the tallest structure in the United States and the second tallest structure in the world after only the Eiffel Tower.  New York City's soon to be opened Woolworth Building would have been shorter, and the Alamo monument even  would have still towered over the Tower of the Americas, currently the tallest structure in San Antonio.  It should be pointed out that the actual Alamo in front of which thing would have stood is truly a very tiny building, and would probably have fit inside the lobby of the Texas museum planned for inside the monument's enormous base.  Unfortunately for the Alamo Heroes Monument Association, the fundraising drive launched with this outlandish drawing could not bring in enough funds towards the projected $2 million cost (in 1912 dollars!), and construction never began.  A much more modestly scaled Alamo Cenotaph, the "Spirit of Sacrifice" by sculptor Pompeo Coppini, was instead built on Alamo Plaza in 1939.  Monument Circle in Indianapolis, Indiana, might be the closest equivalent, albeit without the gilded onion dome and standing only 1/3 the height of what the Alamo Heroes Monument Association had proposed.

 

Alternative, early design by O'Neil Ford for San Antonio's Tower of the Americas:

 

Recently uncovered drawings from local architect O'Neil Ford revealed that he had a much more starkly Brutalist design in mind for the iconic 750-foot high observation tower for HemisFair '68, the 1968 World's Fair.  Time and budget concerns probably led to the less sculptural tower that was actually constructed, but, I must admit, I do much rather like the more strongly flared top.  I even like the blue color, which might have matched well with the blue color of Arquitectonica's Horizon Hill Center, especially in a city whose downtown buildings are primarily light brown terra-cotta.  It certainly would have made an even more radical contrast with that Alamo Heroes Monument, which would have stood close nearby.

 

Zeppelins over the Alamo:

While all San Antonio craned their necks skyward Wednesday, the huge Graf Zeppelin surprised residents by soaring over the city and mooring to the Smith-Young tower.  Hugo Eckener offered free rides to all air-minded persons.  Oh, well—April Fool!—Harvey Patteson Photo.

Local humor on April 1st, 1931...we ended up actually waiting for 77 years until a Zeppelin NT finally floated over San Antonio.

The neo-gothic Smith-Young Tower opened in 1929 as the tallest building in Texas, and remains today San Antonio's most popular and beloved skyscraper, though it never had the capability for zeppelin dockings.  This landmark building designed by Ayres & Ayres was meant to be just one of a grand cluster of such neo-gothic towers in a $10 million downtown development named Bowen Island Skyscrapers, whose scope planned in the mid-1920s by Smith Bros. Properties has been compared to the later Rockefeller Center in Manhattan.  However, months after the opening of the signature piece of the project, the U.S. stock market crashed on Black Tuesday, ushering in the Great Depression and ruining both the Smith Bros. and San Antonio's prewar building boom.  Only a small handful of buildings for the Bowen Island Skyscrapers were completed, and the area never picked up in development afterwards, so we can only imagine...Rockefeller Center, but all in Neo-Gothic!  Throw in some zeppelins if you really want.

 

[TekindusT 3,809]

This thread is the perfect place for the building that, if ever built, would have been by very far the largest domed building in history. The Grosse Halle, centerpiece of the integral Berlin redesign (or simply, the destruction of the city as they knew it in the 1930s and its reconstruction the imperial way) project of Adolf Hitler.

150,000 seats inside. 315 x 315 meters. 320 meters tall. A dome with 250 meters of diameter. The dome of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican City would fit inside... 17 times.

See that small domed thing in the center of the picture? That's the current Reichstag, an already massive building.

Here's a scheme of how would the Grosse Halle fit in the current city. With the north end in today's Hauptbahnhof and the south end stepping in the Bundestag buildings.

Of course, that whole redesign plan is a horrible idea conceived by horrible people... But I can't avoid thinking that, somewhere inside, I would have liked to see this built.

  Edited July 8, 2015 by TekindusT  

[Harry's Place 918]

5 from my city

 

Black Sea Twins

 

 

Constanta Tower

Marina Park Towers

Mamaia Beach 

 

 

World Trade Center

 

[Odainsaker 2,134]

Joske's Tower:

The art deco landmark Joske's Department Store was once billed as "The Biggest Store in the Biggest State" and was an institution in downtown San Antonio shopping ever since Julian Joske founded the store in 1867.  However, like other major departments stores, Joske's closed as populations and retailing shifted out to the suburbs.  The huge building was later attached to Rivercenter Mall, but even the mall could not fill into more than the ground floor of the expansive building, whose upper levels and basement floors have been empty for decades.  Some have hoped to turn the space in a giant Hollywood-esque entertainment center, but the most serious developer proposal was to gut the interior and build a new hotel and residential tower within the shell of the historic art deco façade.

The first design they came up with was this:

Earlier in 2006, it was found that the current limestone art deco façade of the 1936-remodeled Joske's store had simply covered over the previous Victorian red-brick façade, and it was possible to remove sections of the art deco cladding to reveal and restore the older Victorian brickwork.  The designers of the proposed tower had latched onto this effort of historic preservation and clad their glass tower in a patchwork of buff limestone and red brick.  The effort was appreciated, but, most commentators found their patchwork tower to be simply ugly.

The designers went back and tried extending the art deco elements of the current façade, which in 2013 became this:

I'll admit, the new design is too conservative and boring for my taste, and continues the pattern of non-descript, blandly light brown buildings we keep building in paranoia of somehow overshadowing our historic buildings.  Also, post-modern art deco will always look like "fake art deco."  Still, any downtown development is better than no development.

Because this tower proposal not only gutted the interior structure of a historic landmark but also towered over the famous Alamo, city leaders and the Historic Design Review Commission gave it unusually extreme scrutiny, with a deep concerns on scale, sightlines from the Alamo, and potential shadow casting onto the Alamo.  While studies showed fears to be unfounded, word of the project percolated up to UNESCO, which then was considering adding the Alamo and its sister Spanish colonial missions to the UN list of World Heritage Sites.  This would be first World Heritage designation in Texas, only the 23rd in the U.S., and has been a major international endeavor for the city of San Antonio.  When UNESCO suggested that rumors of the impact of the proposed skyscraper might negatively affect San Antonio's bid to receive World Heritage status, city leaders and the HDRC swiftly blocked and killed this project.  Local downtown development fans despaired, while Tea Party Republicans howled that this was proof that World Heritage status meant that the foreign UN would "take over the Alamo" from Texas and even seize our guns at the Alamo's doors.  Sigh...it's always scary when little San Antonio's provincial projects get surreally entangled in crazy national politics.

Officially, this proposal is too large and prominent to be near the Alamo, so the developer has promised to built something elsewhere and find a less towering use for the Joske's site.  The interior was still gutted and new, seemingly oversized internal support columns installed, but no plan has yet been publically revealed by the developer.  Some instead still nostalgically hope for downtown retailing to somehow someday magically return to the old Joske's, but, in the truth, that is just never going to happen given our demographics, and doing nothing until that impossible day would just leave us with an giant empty shell standing on the most prominent corner of the city.

Meanwhile, three days ago, the Alamo shrine along with the rest of the San Antonio Missions attained the coveted World Heritage Site status from the 39th UNESCO World Heritage Committee session in Bonn.  Interestingly, the Alamo did so alongside Gunkanjima, the Battleship Island ruin in Japan.  San Antonio is already anticipating the impact of hordes of new world-traveling tourists from China and Japan...who might have liked a new hotel.

 

W Hotel at Hemisfair Park:

Although this image by AR3D has been floating around for a few months, Mexico-based architectural firm Gomez Vazquez International finally brought it to the public's attention days ago when this image appeared on Reddit.  The redevelopment of Hemisfair Park, the former grounds of the Hemisfair '68, the 1968 World's Fair, is currently San Antonio's largest downtown capital project and its most extensive downtown redesign since the actual 1968 world's exposition.  The design calls for new, mixed-use urban and hotel development along the park's fringes, with an urban gateway facing the Riverwalk intersection of East Market and South Alamo streets highlighted by the red "Torch of Friendship" sculpture.  The edge buildings have not been designed, though most park project renderings suggest mid-rise blocks in conservative, brown stucco masses.  This rendering was floated as an unsolicited design sketch:  the luxury brand W Hotels says that while they would like to build in San Antonio, they have no current plans to build at this particular site, while the CEO of the Hemisfair Park Area Redevelopment Corp. outright said this rendering has "zero chance" of being built.  How fast they jumped to kill it!

The public attention to the image created a local firestorm, and, sadly, something as radically modern as this rendering would probably never fly here.  Too bad, as the concept has all the right elements...streetwalls, gateway, landmark sightlines, and a striking modern style that would deliberately distinguish the city from its neighbors.  An issue for San Antonio is how to develop its downtown in a way that is sensitive to its collection of historic buildings while also not imitating the glass boxes of Dallas or Houston.  Austin is in the midst of a building boom, but many complain that Austin is now trending into a Dallas and Houston clone and is losing those elements that made Austin interesting.  The habit in touristy San Antonio has been to keep make boring buildings in light brown stucco colors and faux-classical conservative designs.  However, a minority camp would embrace bold "fiesta colors" and dramatically modern designs.  I would go further and suggest that old historic buildings can be complemented and even highlighted by radically high-tech designs, so long the streetscape frontage walls and scales are maintained.  I would have no problems putting the likes of the Mori Tower or Umeda Sky Building into the middle of San Antonio...indeed, buildings of that caliber would immediately distinguish us from the rest of Texas and even the rest of the Americas.

Ah well, the gateway bridge would have made a nice complement to the old one drawn thirty years ago by Arquitectonica!

 

Speaking of gateways...

New Kyōto Station design, Kurokawa Kishō:

The third version of Kyōto Station was built in 1952 after the Renaissance Revival pre-WWI building had burned down, however, this starkly concrete Modernist replacement had itself become too old, small, and decrepit for the bustling city, and in 1991 an international competition was held to design another brand new station.  Kurokawa's monumental design would evoke the lost Rashōmon, the ancient southern main gate into the city which once ceremonially aligned along the city's central axis of Suzaku Avenue with the Imperial Palace.  Train stations are now the new gateways into Japanese cities, and the figurative gateway of this station would stand 120 meters (394 feet), higher even than the observation deck of the neighboring Kyōto Tower (whose spire can just bee seen peeking over the model).  Critics called this intimidatingly dark grey behemoth design the "Death Star"...ironically, Takamatsu Shin had already built in Kyoto a command tower for a Star Destroyer.  Hara Hiroshi's competition design for the station was ultimately chosen and the newly completed station opened in 1997, but, I admit that aside from the cavernous interior, it does not quite have the iconic urban form that Kurokawa's design offered.  Amusingly, the built station is still criticized as being too monumentally enormous for the city's skyline.

 

[Thin White Duke 4,072]

It's not like few people knew about it, but this thread wouldn't go without mentioning the late, great plans for 2 WTC. 

[airman15 4,111]

It's not like few people knew about it, but this thread wouldn't go without mentioning the late, great plans for 2 WTC. 

This was another proposal that was made just before the above proposal was finalized. It went by the name of Twin Towers II, and was essentially rebuilding the old twins but five floors taller for each one. And unlike the reflecting pools, it was to include the facade from the original towers.

 

[Thin White Duke 4,072]

I love it.

[airman15 4,111]

I will maintain that this was the design we should have gone for. It would have put more meaning behind rebuilding ourselves stronger had we gone for the Twin Towers II. Hopefully they can at least install the facade around the existing reflecting pools as they are slightly smaller than the actual footprint..

[Odainsaker 2,134]

I admit I was rooting for Sir Norman Foster's competition design for 1 World Trade Center, which had the strongest, almost brutal, monumental presence as an urban cenotaph while also suggested a crystal-locked reflection of the lost twin towers without unnervingly copying them:

 

Ah well, the lighter and less severe Libeskind plan that was ultimately chosen was good as well, but, somehow, we have whittled away the most dramatic and compelling parts of it, such that the disparate pieces no longer add up to the greater whole:

 

I know Foster's design sometimes had an ominously symbolic bent or broken profile, but now have we really gone to stacked boxes teetering towards collapse?

[Thin White Duke 4,072]

I don't like the look of the current 1 WTC. The inward angling makes it look graceless. I'm not a big fan of buildings becoming narrower toward the top, unless it's in the art deco or neo-gothic style. Tors Torn do it better than 1 WTC however. And the London Shard and the NYC Bank Of America building.

[Odainsaker 2,134]

Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, by Herzog & de Meuron:

It looks like a giant tongue, and it has a story to it...

The University of Texas and Austin possessed one of the largest art collections held by a public institution in the U.S., but lacked dedicated display space, thus relegating its huge collection mostly hidden in storage warehouses and scattered among borrowed spaces.  By 1997, movement was made to finally constructed a major art museum, lead in part by sizable donations from aging philanthropist Jack S. Blanton.  Designing great landmark public art museums is an architect's ultimate dream, and this rare large commission drew eager international interest.  It was with great local fanfare and prestige that progressive campus committee of faculty, students, architects, an planners selected the world-renowned Swiss firm of Herzog & de Meuron.  Many expected a signature piece of truly cutting-edge design in a new Texas museums equivalent to the architecturally heralded Kimball Art Museum by Louis Kahn in Fort Worth or the Menil Collection by Renzo Piano in Houston.  All the right pieces seemed to be in place...

One piece not accounted for was the university system's Board of Regent's, a governing board politically appointed by the Texas governor.  Admittedly, such appointments are often done as rewards for political favor in Texas's good-ol'-boy system of patronage and spoils, and appointees are typically politicians in their own right working their way up the state leadership ladder, and many do not even bother to visit the actual campuses.  Still, to have their name carved on the cornerstone of the state's newest and largest art museum in the capital is a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and the Regents did not plan on being left on the sidelines as mere spectators.  While a university procedural system of committee vetting and expert review had been established to oversee the production of the design, the Regents decided this signature project was too important not to invoke their overriding prerogative to take direct personal control of the design process.  Herzog & de Meuron would present their designs directly to them.

Herzog & de Meuron's undulating "tongue" with a vast internal courtyard and concourse was the first and most fully realized of their design proposals, and it startled and polarized everyone, especially the Board of Regents.  While Herzog & de Meuron had been originally vetted and commissioned for their avant-garde design and sophisticated use of materials, the Regents themselves instead desired a traditionalist building, based on a very narrow interpretation of a recently completed Campus Master Plan.  The master plan had originally been championed as a restoration of traditional scale design and planning for the former Beaux-Arts campus, which had over time fallen victim to badly inhumane Modernist and Brutalist mis-design during the 1960s-1990s.  The very same architects and planners who had first drafted the plan, and later vetted Herzog & de Meuron, we aghast to see their plan so terribly misconstrued.  They argued the plan allows that special moments deserve special architecture, while the Regents understood the plan in terms of prescriptive conformity, and so demanded columns and arches, tiled Mediterranean roofs, and chiseled names in marble.  They were not amused when it was pointed out that given the floor area of the program, a fully-tiled hipped roof atop the three-story building would rise as a pyramid of tiles over a dozen more stories high.

Scores of alternative designs and models were presented, but none proved acceptable to an increasingly exasperated board.  The Regents then collected images of what they thought were the ideal inspirations from existing buildings around campus for the architects to use in the design, only to be angrily humiliated when their ideal choices were revealed to be what most faculty, students, and the public openly consider to be worst buildings on campus.  Regent Rita Clements objected to flat roofs, and went so far as to have her personal home re-decorator sketch something that she insisted the commissioned architects try to work with.  Regent Tony Sanchez blatantly decried that the foreign architects from sissy Europe just didn't understand Americans enough to design an American building, and that they should just go back to own countries.  Professionally insulted, and unable to find any point of shared design understanding with the Regents, Herzog & de Meuron resigned.  Other campus design leaders also resigned in protest at what they saw as mistreatment of a design team that had been specially invited here, and Texas was shamed and savaged in national and international architectural periodicals for letting their great work turn into an acrimonious farce.  Some stories suggest that Herzog & de Meuron's last model left for the Regents in calculated spite was a blank white box with no holes even for doors or windows.

Time, money, and reputations had been wasted, and we were no closer of get a museum built.  Philanthropist Blanton was in advanced age, and there were fears that if he wasn't going to see his namesake museum before passing, he might ultimately pull his money for something more immediately lasting.  To everyone's surprise, the Regent's announced that they had already hired their own architectural firm, bypassing the normal procedural vetting and review process.  University and state government watchers cried foul, but as the regents, particularly Tony Sanchez, has been appointees and close political friends of then-Governor George W. Bush, no one expected much too happen.  After Bush became U.S. President, Tony Sanchez tried to unseat Bush's successor Rick Perry in the 2002 Texas gubernatorial election.  Though Sanchez ran as a Democrat, many in Austin remembered his farcical, antagonistic, and pompous term as a stubborn regent, and many knowing Democrats in disgust voted instead for the Republican.  I admit, I was one of those that actually voted for Rick Perry!

The Regents ultimately got the museum building they so desperately wanted...

...a completely forgettable, irrelevant, and banal building.  We don't know of this building here because it is not worth knowing.  However, what was importantly was that it had high-class fancy columns, high-class fancy arches, false windows for classical symmetry, and a pyramid of orange tiles for a roof!

Ironically, this museum is contemporaneous with the State-operated Bullock Texas History Museum, which opened earlier across the street.  While some hoped that these would be the kernels for a tightly designed museum district terminating the capitol axis, the Texas History Museum itself became another bad example of suburban big-box mall architecture posing on the front as something vaguely traditional.  Neither museum building really enhances the other, and the capitol terminating axis is an urbanist failure.

Herzog & de Meuron moved on to greater fame designing London's mighty Tate Modern gallery out of the old Bankside Power Station.  Sharing an organic form similar to the initially proposed Blanton, Herzog & de Meuron's later Allianz Arena from Munich and the world famous "Bird's Nest" National Stadium from the Beijing Olympics have even both made it into SimCity as amazing BATs.  To think that Texas might have had something architecturally on par...a truly lost opportunity.

 

[Thin White Duke 4,072]

Giant tongue? I think it looks like a sushi.

[JP Schriefer 5,590]

Thank God this bizarre building would be built in my city by a local architecture office, Farkasvölgyi Arquitetura, was canceled few weeks ago. It's called Complexo Andradas, the main building was suppose to have 350m high and be the tallest building in Latin America. It was cancelled due to the country economic recession. They still want to make in the lot the tallest building in Brazil, with 240m, but the new project wasn't shown yet.

[Thin White Duke 4,072]

As a design I don't think it looks too bad. Maybe put it somewhere it blends in more easily, though.

[Odainsaker 2,134]

Icicles and sake sashimi--imagine the nightlights!  Yet, they are still better than...

"Tree of Life," San Pedro Creek Improvement Project, San Antonio, Texas:

Currently in the design phase is the $175 million San Pedro Creek Improvement Project, a flood control and beautification project on the inner west side of downtown San Antonio paralleling and inspired by the famous River Walk.  The San Pedro Creek has been reduced to little more than an a foul drainage ditch running through an underdeveloped, mostly light industrial area, but it is believed that the improvement project will spur a revitalization and redevelopment of the near west side, much as the River Walk expansions have done for the River North and South Side areas.  A broader Westside Creeks Restoration Plan covering the various creeks, lakes, and watersheds feeding into San Pedro Creek is also underway, with the eventual aim of making a network of inner city linear parks with resuscitated ecosystems and habitats.

As it skirts into the downtown area, the San Pedro Creek is the more urbanized segment with significant flood control walls, bridges, amphitheaters, and public art installations.  The public art has become the more controversial of the design aspects due to the escalating projected costs and the high visibility, and the most contentiously visible was the so-called "Tree of Life Plaza" concept, boasting a gateway sculpture with leaf-like, wind-paddle accoutrements towering over a ceremonial upstream plaza lined with statuary at the project's head.  The involved artists and planners warned us that the image of the sculptures was only conceptual, and that what we are seeing in the presentations are really only placeholders.  Too late...damage done...the tacky-looking cartoon things scared off the public at the public input hearings, as did the new overall project price tag of $206.8 million.  The Rivard Report last month told us new design will be heavily toned down:

The kryptonite power crystals of the "Tree of Life" will thankfully be replaced with actual trees.  However, if they really wanted an arch symbolizing Life, could they not have covered it with cheerful and colorful bougainvillea instead of the plastic flappers?  Stupidly, they had outlandishly overdesigned their "placeholders," undermined the project's support.

Unfortunately, the deserved fallout from the "Tree of Life" inadvertently hit other parts of the project, most notably the Salinas Street Bridge "shade structure":

Except for the sure-to-be-shattered glass railings, I liked it, though others objected to the loud LED colors and woven shape while attacking it on costs.  Alternative plans will revise the railings with a more subdued weave pattern:

Hmph...maybe another arch with bougainvillea?  I know it's not Dōtonbori, but we should allow ourselves some magic glitter, and a chain of special moments approaching the iconic neon spire of the Art Deco Alameda Theater in the background is a sound idea.  Others don't agree, and to make the point, the proposed spire of the amphitheater in front of the Alameda is also going to shrink:

For good measure, they took a few more bites out of that funkily cored apple in order to shave costs.  Can you see its reduced, cost-savings spire?  Actually, it is now understood that this amphitheater will be completely redesigned, as the future Frost Bank headquarters skyscraper is currently being planned for the site on the left-hand side of the above image.  That building project has not announced an architect or unveiled any designs yet, but it is suspected that a plaza of some sort will reach to the creek, and that the amphitheater may flip its layout to accommodate.

We will see what they ultimately build come 2018.

[Thin White Duke 4,072]

Chicago spire. Supposed to reach 610 m (2000 ft) of height, it was going to be the first Megatall in the Western hemisphere. Then there was a global financial crisis and construction din't get further than to dig a hole in the ground.

[matias93 7,535]

Paseo Bulnes, the civic district of Santiago de Chile. In fact, mostly done at begginings of the 20th century, was never culminated.

In the first image, an idea of the original project: La Moneda (presidential palace, colonial minting house) at the center, facing Alameda (the main avenue of the city). A long line of similar buildings encase the palace and trace a line to the south (up). At the end, a gross plagiarism of D.C, with an obelisk (hey, the argentinians had one, why we don't?), and a downscaled Capitol building (again, not on a hill, even on a hilly city). Luckily, those were never built; the placement was great, but the concept wasn't.

The remodelation of 2010s: again the same view, all the mid-rise buildings built, but a couple of changes. No roundabout, but grass and green tinted concrete to make an esplanade (always empty and closed, chilean way) with a huge flag in the middle (no one likes it), and a pair of twin towers at the end. Again, the south end of Paseo Bulnes stays forgotten and none of those towers has been built.

What takes us to the present, bringed by Google Earth. As you see, there are the mid-rises, the empty esplanade, the flagpole (G.E doesn't show it correctly) and the almost empty south end, without towers, and with a private university instead of Congress building.

And where is the Congress? In two places, in fact. One in the old (colonial) building in Santiago, two blocks north of La Moneda:

And 100 kilometers west, at Valparaíso, with a brutalist-esque building that, again, no one likes.

[9gruntsand1hammer 3,194]

1181 Queen Street West, 26 floors, Toronto.

[Odainsaker 2,134]

Speaking of holes in the ground...

Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), Waxahachie, Texas.

U.S. Department of Energy's ultimate science project was first planned in the 1980s as the Reagan Administration pursued a "science race" against the Soviet Union, which then planning their own competing UNK proton accelerator in Protvino.  America's particle accelerator would have been the largest and most powerful yet--it's 54-mile ring circumference and collision energy would have been triple that of even today's record-breaking Large Hadron Collider at CERN.  The small prairie town of Waxahachie south of Dallas would become the center of a planned $4 billion investment in cutting-edge physics, a bonanza which would have brought continual direct and indirect investment to Texas's economy and its educational fields.  This was the "High Tex" era of high-tech, with goliath Texas Instruments in Dallas, Electronic Data Systems in Plano, Radio Shack in Fort Worth, Dell Computers near Austin, and, of course, NASA in Houston. 

I read somewhere the number of magnets needed would have equated to the amount of iron needed to build four Eiffel Towers.  Over 400 property owners were displaced, while 200 scientists packed up their families and moved onto Texas prairieland.  After 17 access shafts were dug, 14 miles of underground tunnel were bored, and $2 billion was spent on a science project whose expected costs had mushroomed to $12 billion, the U.S. Congress got cold feet and killed the SSC project in 1993.  On top of the $2 billion now officially wasted, another $1 billion would be needed just to wind down and close the project.  Stories tell of acrimony among Democratic state and Federal administrations against a mammoth project started by their Republican predecessors, of freshmen congressmen hoping to steer funds to other projects in their home states, and of a running debate before a looming Republican belt-tightening takeover between defunding an unseen hole in the ground or a grandiose International Space Station high above with lots of Space Shuttle imagery.  The Soviets were gone, their competing UNK proton collider had also fizzled under budget constraints, and the ISS promised to usher in a new era of U.S.-Russian cooperation in space.  Everybody knows space stations are cooler!

Amid the celebrations over the LHC at CERN having detected the Higgs boson, the so-called "God particle," Texas Monthly offered this fascinating article:  "How Texas Lost the World's Largest Supercollider."  The "Deserton" conceivably could have gotten us here over a decade ago and then beyond...dark matter today perhaps?...instead, the world's focus for advanced physics is now on Switzerland, Texas has enjoyed a two-decade-long political brain drain, and NASA astronauts have to reach the space station by paying Vladimir Putin for rides on Russian rockets.  For many, the loss of the Superconducting Super Collider was a watershed moment in the Politics of Big Science and American scientific leadership, and while CERN is concerned with creating micro black holes, Texas ended up with a big black hole of a different sort.

 

[matias93 7,535]

@odainsacker lesson of today: technological progress is intimately related to war, even more if cold.

[airman15 4,111]

This one was posted a long time ago in another thread but seeing as how it's unlikely to ever see construction, it might be appropriate to repost in this thread.

This was the Dynamic Tower, aptly named for it's ability to let each floor rotate in a complete circle.

Each floor rotates along a central axis which houses elevators, maintenance, and so forth. The rest of the floorspace is devoted to everything else. The idea was to give a panoramic view of the whole cityscape. But the big question is how is anyone supposed to find their room when everything is constantly spinning? Let alone those poor guys who are stumbling for their door at 2am after a long night of partying?

[Odainsaker 2,134]

Piazza San Lorenzo, San Antonio, Texas, c. 2005

315 feet of downtown River Walk frontage for a condominium and residential "urban village" project themed after Renaissance Italy, complete with "Spanish Steps" derived from Rome and miniature version of the Torre d'Arnolfo from the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence and St. Mark's Campanile from Venice.  La Residenza luxury condominiums would be in structures named Villa Símona, Villa Bernini, Villa Palladio, and Villa Regina.  La Verona would be a private residential resort club.  The historic Book Building on Houston Street would be integrated as retail into the project, while the abandoned Solo Serve Building, a discount store which comprises much of the site along Soledad Street, would be demolished.  Historically, this was the site of the Spanish colonial Veramendi Palace, the residence of the Mexican provincial governor at the time of the Texas Revolution.  The doors of the Old Veramendi House, built in the early 1700s, are now enshrined inside the Alamo.

Amusingly, even the proposal renderings suggest Renaissance paintings.  Personally, I am suspicious of these sorts of themed projects, for the inauthentic architecture even at its best looks like something from Las Vegas, while at its worst, looks like a suburban strip mall.  The traditional historic style for San Antonio usually adopted for such themes would be Spanish Colonial or Spanish Mission architecture.  A broad Mediterranean Revival is common, but such a throwback to Italian Renaissance Florence is actually rather foreign.  Still, while those all largely fit together with commonly scaled elements, the needs of modern buildings and current construction bring scales that too radically distort those styles.  The result is post-Modern decoration pasting...just put some arches and columns and earth tone colors on the most visible spots, and perhaps we won't notice the fabricated flatness.  Admittedly, it would have been an architectural complement to the neighboring Hotel Valencia Riverwalk on the opposite bank of the river, as that hotel building also embraced a more generalized, contemporary Faux Mediterranean style.

San Antonio is nicknamed the "Venice of Texas" due to its winding River Walk system, but I don't think anyone actually expected to literally plop the Italian Renaissance into the middle of the city.  Still, regardless of the peculiarities of style, I am cheerleader for downtown construction and of downtown residential urbanization.  However, this project began soliciting for luxury tenants to invest just as the national housing bubble was quietly imploding.  The Bush Economy would soon spectacularly pop and crash into the Great recession, and financing for projects like this swiftly evaporated.

AC Hotels by Marriott proposed a new plan a few months ago for this site, and they succeeded in gaining approval to finally demolish the old Solo Serve.  The modern interior of the historic Book Building on Houston Street will gutted and converted into the grand entrance for a 252-room AC Hotel.  Should the first hotel phase be successful, the developer plans a second phase additional office building:

I'll be honest...the proposed hotel tower, whiplashing away from the previously proposed Italian Renaissance piazza, is still rather forgettable, and the actual selling point of the rendering is the re-enlivened historical Book Building with all its arched windows lit at the image center.  Ah well, I will still take any such development over the current dead building shells, though I wish they could somehow revive the use of the name and idea of the old "Veramendi Palace."

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Speaking of the architecture of post-Modernism:  it was announced yesterday that the developers of the proposed new Frost Bank tower have selected Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects to design the bank's new headquarters tower only two blocks west from this site.  While we do not yet know what sort of design is being envisioned, Frost Bank promises an iconic, signature headquarters tower for their hometown skyline, which hasn't had a major skyscraper built in 30 years, and it seems likely that this future building will become San Antonio's next tallest skyscraper.  While the scale of this project is still very modest in comparison to that in big sister cities Dallas and Houston, much is being expected architecturally from the designers of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur.  If all goes well, construction is projected for later next year and is aimed for completion in 2018 or 2019...hopefully, by then this will not be a project we have to further add to this thread.

 

 

[9gruntsand1hammer 3,194]

Loretto Fallsview, Niagara Falls, Canada.

[SteveMSim 275]

The Illinois Tower, proposed by Frank Lloyd Wright for Chicago in 1956.

Rising to a height of 5,280 feet (1610 meters), The Illinois, also known as Mile-High Building, was to be a multi-use, one mile high skyscraper built along the lake shore in Chicago.  The building was Frank Lloyd Wright's answer to the urban sprawl of Chicago.  The Illinois would have been 528 stories, with a gross area of 18,460,000 square feet (1,715,000 m²), and have 76 elevators, each having five-floor-high tandem cabs, serving blocks of five floors simultaneously. Wright stated that there would have been parking for 15,000 cars and 150 helicopters.

Had it been built, The Illinois would been the world's tallest building, standing over four times as high as the Empire State Building, and twice as tall as the Burj Khalifa, currently the world's tallest building.  One interesting note is that the Burj Khalifa's design was inspired by The Illinois.

 

[airman15 4,111]

The Illinois Tower, proposed by Frank Lloyd Wright for Chicago in 1956.

Rising to a height of 5,280 feet (1610 meters), The Illinois, also known as Mile-High Building, was to be a multi-use, one mile high skyscraper built along the lake shore in Chicago.  The building was Frank Lloyd Wright's answer to the urban sprawl of Chicago.  The Illinois would have been 528 stories, with a gross area of 18,460,000 square feet (1,715,000 m²), and have 76 elevators, each having five-floor-high tandem cabs, serving blocks of five floors simultaneously. Wright stated that there would have been parking for 15,000 cars and 150 helicopters.

Had it been built, The Illinois would been the world's tallest building, standing over four times as high as the Empire State Building, and twice as tall as the Burj Khalifa, currently the world's tallest building.  One interesting note is that the Burj Khalifa's design was inspired by The Illinois.

 

For a building like this, I would imagine the footprint would have to be about half; maybe the same size footprint Boeing's Everett factory.

[Mr Saturn64 742]

American Commerce Center, Philadelphia.  I remember hoping they'd build this one. 

http://www.skyscrapersunset.com/projects/construction/acc/outline.jpg  

 

[SteveMSim 275]

Like Hitler with Berlin, Joseph Stalin had grand plans for Moscow.  The crown jewel of those building plans was the Palace of the Soviets, a supertall skyscraper that was to be the seat of the government of the Soviet Union, on the site of the Cathedral of Christ The Saviour.  In 1931 Stalin held an international competition for the design of the Palace of the Soviets.  Although some of the most renown architects of the time, such as Le Corbusier, Auguste Perret and Walter Gropius, the winning design went to Russian architect Boris Iofan, who came up with a colossal Neoclassical skyscraper topped with an 80 meter high statue of Vladimir Lenin.  The total height of the building was to be 495 meters (1,624 feet), including the statue.  The international architecture community was aghast with the design, which they considered incompatible with what they viewed at the time to be a very progressive Socialist republic.

After the winning design was approved, the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was demolished by blowing it up with dynamite.  The design underwent several revisions until construction of the new building began in 1937.  By 1941 only the foundations were completed when World War II interrupted the project.  The steel for the building's tower, which had already been made, was instead used for Moscow defense fortifications and bridges.  Plans were to resume construction after the war, but they were never implemented.  After Stalin's death in 1953, the plans for resuming construction were finally shelved, and in 1958 the site became an enormous swimming pool.

The Palace of the Soviets' design inspired the architecture of the Seven Sisters skyscrapers that were built in Moscow in the post-WWII era.  In the 1990s, the pool was closed and bulldozed, and the Cathedral was reconstructed.

Had the Palace of the Soviets been completed, this is what Moscow would look like today:

[TekindusT 3,809]

Amazing! 

 In 1931 Stalin held an international competition for the design of the Palace of the Soviets.  Although some of the most renown architects of the time, such as Le Corbusier, Auguste Perret and Walter Gropius, the winning design went to Russian architect Boris Iofan, who came up with a colossal Neoclassical skyscraper topped with an 80 meter high statue of Vladimir Lenin. 

Well, knowing just a little bit of Socialist classicist architecture I'd say it was absolutely impossible that Le Corbusier or Gropius would have ever won that contest. It is quite big statement, but Stalin liked Stalinism and liked this kind of architecture. He was the one that had the last word on the general design of anything monumental to be constructed and what not; and it was generally considered that the Bauhaus and modernist architects were "too western" for Stalin's Soviet Union.

  Edited November 8, 2015 by TekindusT