#unbuilt architecture

[chromedream]

Rhododendron Chapel, unbuilt by project by Frank Lloyd Wright, 1952. John Howe, delineator

via

[mirroredcolumn]

Concept art for the unbuilt Ruck-A-Chucky Bridge by architect Myron Goldsmith and engineer T.Y. Lin (1978)

[myarchitectphil]

IDEAL CITIES - NOT

Chongqing again. Here are the buildings we designed, neither of which have been built 12 years later, judging from Google Earth images from February of this year. The first was an exercise in an Art Deco influenced design which they love so much over there. It was planned to be built at a major new transit hub of crossing train and subway lines. On top of the subway station, which was very deep, there were to be several levels of an underground shopping mall. Judging from the aerial, the underground structures may be in place. The first image is our original concept, the second a later toning down.

The second project is unapologetically modern. It was to have been built near the National Theater at the junction of the two rivers, across from where Safdie's Raffles Center was built. There is a hole in the ground, waiting to be filled.

All of the unbuilt projects one has designed could populate ones own little ideal city. Maybe we will put them all together one day!

[philaretey]

IDEAL CITIES - NOT

Chongqing again. Here are the buildings we designed, neither of which have been built 12 years later, judging from Google Earth images from February of this year. The first was an exercise in an Art Deco influenced design which they love so much over there. It was planned to be built at a major new transit hub of crossing train and subway lines. On top of the subway station, which was very deep, there were to be several levels of an underground shopping mall. Judging from the aerial, the underground structures may be in place. The first image is our original concept, the second a later toning down.

The second project is unapologetically modern. It was to have been built near the National Theater at the junction of the two rivers, across from where Safdie's Raffles Center was built. There is a hole in the ground, waiting to be filled.

All of the unbuilt projects one has designed could populate ones own little ideal city. Maybe we will put them all together one day!

[nyc-uws]

http://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/2014/05/21/in-1911-the-proposed-mccarren-bridge-was-to-replace-the-old-brooklyn-bridge-while-it-was-being-reconstructed/

[newyorkthegoldenage]

The first architectural rendering of the future Rockefeller Center (then called Metropolitan or Radio City) was revealed on March 6, 1931.

The press was not kind. "The crux of the problem is that Radio City is ugly," wrote the Herald Tribune. "The exterior is hideously dull and ugly." The Times referred to its "architectural fallacies and horrors." The central feature of the design, a circular structure to house Chase National Bank, was called an "oil drum."

The architects were sent back to the drawing board, with Raymond Hood now advising. He opened up the campus, which had had a lot of buildings crammed into a small space, replaced the brick with limestone, and scrapped the oil drum. He also added rooftop gardens to several buildings and placed a fountain in the sunken plaza.

Photo: istoriadelosrascacielosdenuevayork

[blech]

SF Yimby, in their story on the Transamerica Pyramid, featuring an earlier design by architects William L. Pereira & Associates:

The unbuilt ABC Tower in New York early study of elevator travel times, illustration by William L Pereira & Associates courtesy the USC Library

[probablyasocialecologist]

The first thing you’ll notice — perhaps helped by a translation app, as tourists and monolingual English speakers are not among Familjny’s usual clientele — is that the food is outrageously cheap. Once you’ve worked out what dishes you want, you queue up to a little niche. You ask here for what you want, and you’ll be given a bit of paper. You take this to a larger niche, from which you can see the kitchen, and you give it to a uniformed staff member, who would usually be middle-aged or older. They will dollop the particular parts of your meal onto your plate. Then you sit down, and you eat it, and when you’ve finished, you put the plate and your cutlery onto a rack — there is nothing so servile as waiting staff. There are some drawbacks to this system, to be sure. I have only once or twice been in a milk bar that had a toilet, and because at lunchtime especially there are always a lot of people queueing, you are not encouraged to linger. You eat, and then you go home or back to work — but you’ll have been able to have a decent three-course meal of soup, a main course, and a slice of cake for the equivalent of, at the very most, £5, in a country where the cost of living is almost comparable to Britain’s.

[...]

In Poland, the milk bar idea has been dated by some to the late nineteenth century, when the bulk of Poland, including Warsaw, was under Tsarist Russian occupation. Milk bars would offer locally produced food to benefit Polish farmers, and there would be no alcohol to cloud the minds of Polish workers, and also, importantly, little meat, which would make the food both cheaper and healthier. But nearly every milk bar in Poland was opened between 1945 and 1989, becoming the local example of a subgenre of cheap communal eating facilities built and encouraged by state socialist governments; what distinguishes it today is the fact that it still endures, for reasons which are complicated and surprising. Communal eating was regarded as being of crucial importance by Bolshevik thinkers from the start. Partly, this was a consequence of their pioneering feminism. Both for Lenin and for explicitly liberationist thinkers like Alexandra Kollontai, one of the central tasks of the revolutionary government that seized power in October 1917 was to free working-class women from ‘kitchen slavery’, as exemplified in the St Petersburg’s textile industry, which saw women work in factories all day and then go home and cook (and clean) for their menfolk. Early plans were highly ambitious, and they were integrated with avant-garde architecture and urban design; a few remnants of this programme survive in the larger cities of Russia, and Ukraine in particular. When researching a book on Soviet architecture in the 2010s, I went looking for a few of these, and the results were often sad to behold. In St Petersburg — then Leningrad — at the end of the 1920s, a team of architects, some of whom had worked with Vladimir Tatlin on his famous unbuilt twisting tower in tribute to the Third International, were charged with designing communal kitchens in the factory districts of the city. All three of them survive, but they have been turned into dodgy nightclubs, cheap malls, or worse: the finest of the group, a fabulous, dynamic, futuristic building, in the Narvskaya Zastava district, had been subdivided into little units by, among others, McDonalds. In Moscow meanwhile, enormous Constructivist bakeries were built around the city. One of the largest of them, Bakery Plant No. 5, was turned into a museum of Constructivism in 2022; the year, that is, of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a vainglorious nationalist slaughter that would have horrified the socialist modernists behind these buildings. In the 1920s, housing was sometimes built in such a way as to encourage its inhabitants to eat collectively. In Moscow’s experimental Narkomfin Communal House, duplex apartments were connected by a walkway to a restaurant, a library, a nursery, and a gym, with a roof garden on top; inside the flats, kitchens were either tiny or, in the ‘fully collectivised’ apartments, absent entirely, with the assumption that you could always eat in, or take your food from, the communal restaurant. For its Constructivist architect Moisei Ginzburg, this would liberate women residents entirely from the assumption — unavoidable in the early twentieth century — that they would be cooking the dinner. But in the Stalin era, Soviet food culture became much more hierarchical. These dreams of vast avant-garde dining halls serviced by streamlined, automated processes and administered by happy class-conscious workers were replaced with, at the top, a series of luxury restaurants for the nomenklatura; at the bottom, factory canteens; and, in between, the stolovaya — a network of public dining halls across the country, expanded especially in the more egalitarian Khrushchev era, during which period modernist glass box cafes also appeared in the larger urban centres, as a return to the 1920s dreams of automated communal luxury.

17 February 2025

[chromedream]

Concept for a domed cinema by architect Vincent G. Raney (1966)

via

[germanpostwarmodern]

A key publication on Aldo van Eyck without doubt is Francis Strauven's monograph "Aldo van Eyck - Relativiteit en Verbeelding“, published by Meulenhoff in 1994 (the English version „The Shape of Relativity“ followed in 1998). In close cooperation with Van Eyck Strauven sleuths the origins and influences of the architect's design and philosophical principles and combines them with his built and unbuilt works, his writings and personal network. The result is a behemoth of a book comprising 680 pages and predominantly focusing on Van Eyck's childhood, education and work until 1963. Strauven justifies this seemingly narrow focus with the importance of these formative years that his fundamental conceptions took shape in these years and very much culminated in his Orphanage completed in 1960. Up to this point Van Eyck had received a very international and broad education through his childhood in England, the intellectually stimulating household he came from and his architecture studies at ETH Zurich. Through the acquaintance with Carola Giedion-Welcker, Siegfried Giedion’s wife, he was also introduced to the world of contemporary art that would become a decisive influence on his world view and which ultimately led to his core conviction of relativity being the basis of 20th century culture. Francis Strauven undoubtedly is an admirer and eloquent exegete of Aldo van Eyck and his partisanship certainly also shows in the book. But through the closeness to the architect he also was able to profoundly examine and explain the work, life and intellectual cosmos of one of the 20th century's most important but somewhat underrated architects. I have read the book several times but always discover new aspects and strands of thought to reflect on, a quality only few books possess and which makes this volume a true must-read!

[physalian]

11 Underexplored settings of post-apocalyptic worlds

Inspired once again by my recent binge of abandoned explorations.

The greatest hits of the sprawling city scapes and farmland that feature in everything from post-alien invasions to zombie takeovers to just worlds gone by in a not-so-distant future tend to be:

Generic office buildings

Churches

Schools

Water parks

Suburbs

Famous monuments

Cruise ships

It’s come to my attention though just how many architectural abnormalities there are, in their own current post-apocalyptic states, that would absolutely befuddle archaeologists centuries from now trying to figure out their purposes.

So whether you want to go hard into “this new world has completely forgotten what came before it” or your very own and unique road trip through desolation, here’s some suggestions for cool and/or practical settings!

1. Disney/Iconic Theme Parks

2000 years from now after X disaster strikes, survivors completely removed from historical context stumble upon…. Disney World. They presume Mickey really was a giant mutant mouse, or a mouse-shaped deity worshiped by the local populace (and I mean… are they wrong?). People who might have never left the local area without planes and feasible transport, or knowledge that land across the ocean even exists, might be astounded by the buildings of Epcot’s World Showcase, or any of Disney’s themed resorts.

Water parks are done to death, but not enough emphasis is put onto how bizarre these places would look without context, even to a younger generation that has no idea what it used to be.

Orlando has a hotel with its own rainforest in a massive atrium, with ponds and boats and boardwalks inside. But, you know, I guess strolling through Chicago or New York City is cooler. It may be unfilmable, but it’s not unwritable.

2. The foundations of unfinished construction projects

The remains of an office building that never was, a veritable modern Stonehenge with how little would survive an apocalypse. Inexplicable areas of land with massive pits for unbuilt parking garages, or sprawling swimming pools and lazy rivers.

Or massive, skeletal towers that would have been the monument to a much larger estate that just lost funding. Buildings still surrounded by scaffolding, only half-complete with their windows.

3. Survivor’s encampment landmarked by a monument/hotel/theme park that was never built

In one of those abandoned videos, a company in China was trying to build a discount Disneyland and all that remains is an unfinished Cinderella Castle with steel shells of the gables… behind a modern shopping mall.

Any structure that would have been deeply out of place either in the country it’s built in, or the newer buildings that surround it, immediately looks more creative than just ‘generic strip mall’ or ‘generic high school’. And it’s also realistic, as projects like this fall through constantly, as a unique piece of your worldbuilding. Or, it did have its run as whatever the strange building was part of, and through bankruptcy and selling the land around it, it ends up being the only structure that remains.

4. Hotels that are made up as if the staff vanished instantaneously

Or, many, many Covid victims. Having your characters scrounge for resources through a hotel with beds still made, coffee cups on the breakfast tables, serving spoons and plates ready to go by the buffet. Halloween, Christmas, or Valentine’s decorations still on display.

The schedules for the final week of business still hanging in the offices, unopened mail, packages for guests still in the mail room, pallets of new soaps and supplies still in the delivery bay from the distribution center, linens still in the industrial dryers. I worked in a hotel scheduled for eventual demolition and the disrepair the interior fell into because, what’s the point of managing mold and bed bugs when it’s all getting gutted anyway, makes it super creepy knowing guests are completely clueless on the other side.

Places that have been completely ransacked and destroyed are creepy, sure, but places that are almost frozen in time despite the decay around them are both eerie, and rather dark. Cruise ships/confined spaces like ships tend to be used more for horror, but these, too, as if they’re frozen in time.

5. Cargo ships/shipping yards

An easy-ish one to film in. Looters breaking open shipping containers, or building entire communities and homes out of those containers either on land, or on the barges and ships. A community that can weigh anchor and move once resources and scavenging dries up, or another violent group moves in on the land.

Or, in the case of a viral apocalypse, a community relatively spared from the violence out on the open ocean.

6. IKEA/Furniture Warehouses and DC’s

Warehouses especially have few entries and fewer windows to secure, but as their contents (except the showroom floor) are in mint condition at the time of the world ending and probably stored in plastic and crates, they’d be relatively spared from the elements as a good base camp.

Furniture is also too heavy to loot in a panic and absconding with a brand new mattress probably wouldn’t be at the top of people’s minds as doomsday approaches.

Your little community each having their own lavish living spaces with whatever eclectic furniture they either liked or could now get their hands on for free would just be cool to read about.

7. Penthouse suites

Climbing those stairs would suck and depending on the build quality, the safety of the structure over time would degrade, but maybe your community has manual cranks for the elevators. There might be one way down, but there’s also only one way up, and you can see invaders and catastrophe coming for miles.

These places tend to be dripping in luxury your characters might otherwise have never experienced and they could either make a base there, or have a grand old time trashing the place up because the rich are dead and gone.

8. Historical forts

They lasted this long, why not a few centuries more? The fort that comes to mind is the Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, Florida, right on the beach with a built-in defense wall and a huge courtyard for your community of plucky survivors.

Castles, too, though they’d likely be prime real estate for all manner of interested parties. Aging, famous forts are just never in these types of stories, unless it’s a picture of where the military used to be, now overrun or destroyed.

9. Ski resorts

Similar to the made-up hotels and theme parks, this one comes with presumably multiple buildings, potential use of the slopes and ski transports, isolation via elevation and remoteness from major cities, and the threat of bitter winters and blizzards.

Never been to one myself in winter, but remote locations for a post-apocalypse story tends to just be shorthand for “generic farm or small town,” which isn’t super immersive.

10. Luxury malls

Seen in The Last of US, it gives you a microcosm of so many different environments all slapped together and there’s no limit on what kinds of stores you could include, or all the kiosks, all the mini attractions like trampolines, kiddie parks, massage tables, and even VR flight simulators.

Maybe it has a theater tacked onto it, or a double-story book store, one of those rental spaces dedicated to fancy cars or candy stores. Great for the main setting or even just passing through, especially as they’re already a dying breed you can go ham with. ‘Luxury’ and designer items collecting dust right across from the discount store with everything for under &14.99 could strike a powerful message about social constructs.

11. Science museums

Sure you can make some poignant message about priceless artwork being left to rot, or. When I was a kid, I went to a science center with natural disaster simulators like house fires and tornadoes and a whole-ass IMAX theater where I saw Night at the Museum, the only movie I’ve ever seen in a proper IMAX dome.

There was a whole kids section with a ropes course, area for exploring the human body, a NASA-sponsored mock up space module, mock up grocery store, and little exhibits here and there about optical illusions and the physics behind laying on a bed of nails and how it doesn’t kill you. It’s just something unique and fun that your characters can interact with and gives them plenty to play off and give little anecdotes to make them feel more human.

—

Point is, your post-apocalypse doesn’t have to be limited to the usual suspects. We’ve all seen the strip malls and Walmarts and suburban homes and farms. There is no special effects budget or filming restraint in a book and I’d love to read more stories set in unique and descriptive places, or just fresh takes on your standard survival camp that isn’t just “build a wall around a section of neighborhood”.

It’s the apocalypse. All real estate becomes free real estate.

[the-cheerful-necrosimblr]

High-end two bedroom apartment

Please please please excuse the fact that you can see unbuilt normal suburbia outside the windows💀this build belongs in one of the pinecrest apartments but for whatever reason I built it on an empty lot instead.

With that aside, I'm especially pleased with the home office workspace in this one. It's very cluttered without being unusuably messy.

The architectural style is supposed to seem on the older side, with more modern decor.

[phoenixyfriend]

Those Economics/Architecture Videos I've Been Bingeing

But eating less bandwidth than the previous version of this post.

This post has 100 links, because that's how many tumblr lets me add before it refuses to save the post anymore. (Legacy editor allows up to 250, but then I would have the colors.)

A lot of these are about NYC, because that's my personal main focus, but there are a few others. Also, I have absolutely no training in this field and only started watching these a few days ago but Ya Girl Is Bingeing and Really Loves Edutainment. All the descriptions are my own, btw. I'm not looking to gain clicks or references, I want you guys to know what you're getting into.

I was not involved in creating any of these videos, but it did take me over a week to watch them all and decide which ones to include, how to organize, and how to describe the contents.

I cannot speak to a lot of the deeper issues touched on, and do not agree with all the political or economic points brought up in these videos (as this is a wide range of people and topics), but they are by and large a good look at much of an industry that most people, myself included, don't know enough about, considering how crucial it is to our lives.

I'm open to channel/video recs but there are a few I ran into that seem well-done but have an audio quality I can't work with, so that's... unfortunate.

Stewart Hicks - Chicago-based, professor of architecture at the University of Illinois

Why Skyscrapers Are Losing Their Tops - Stewart Hicks - The general history of architectural styles for skyscrapers from the 1930s to the near future.

Why Do Architects Insist on Using Flat Roofs? - Stewart Hicks - Compares and contrasts the strengths and weaknesses of flat vs gabled roofs.

How Buildings Changed After the Eiffel Tower - Stewart Hicks - Thirteen minutes of history on structural engineering in bridges and skyscrapers.

The Bewildering Architecture of Indoor Cities - Stewart Hicks - Goes into the planned and unplanned variants of this phenomenon, which ranges from giant buildings intended to act as an entire community, to the unplanned network of underground tunnels or overstreet enclosed walkways that let people cross blocks upon blocks of a city without having to step outside.

How This Tower Barely Touches the Ground - Stewart Hicks - Addresses the engineering behind 150 N. Riverside in Chicago, and the zoning laws that caused its rather unique Y-shaped base in the first place, along with the requirements causing things like custom giant I-beams and necessitating a barge to host the crane since they had nowhere to anchor one on the ground.

How Chicago is Being Unbuilt: Back to Nature - Stewart Hicks - Explores the ways in which Chicago is undoing prior urbanization, and implementing some new eco-friendly infrastructure and various projects.

Why We Should Live in Our Office Buildings - Stewart Hicks - More and more office buildings are standing empty. With movements towards more mixed zoning and the return to walkable city models, some of those office buildings are getting retrofitted to be livable spaces and mixed-use locations.

How Architects Design for Less Lonely Living - Stewart Hicks - In a lot of places, like the US, the way we interact or avoid other people is impacted heavily by the organization of the buildings we live in.

House Sizes Are Getting Absurd - Stewart Hicks - Just a fun romp comparing the range of sizes (from the bare minimum of capsule hotels to the absurd mass of some modern estates) for various dwellings. Lots of very deliberate visualization.

Shopping Malls are Getting Desperate - Stewart Hicks - Discusses the decline of shopping malls, and the 'tricks' they employ to try to keep people happy and coming by.

The Architecture of Curb Appeal - Stewart Hicks - There's a lot that goes into making a house look good in a way that gets it sold. A lot of people hate it.

The Controversy Over Accessory Dwelling Units - Stewart Hicks - In many places, it's illegal to build a smaller livable space in your backyard. You know, places you put an adult child who wants their own space, or your mother-in-law, or just rent out to college students for the next ten months. But, at least in a few places, it's not going to be illegal much longer.

Toilets Need to Change - Stewart Hicks - Plumbing is such an important part of our daily lives, and it's still evolving!

The Hidden Meaning and Logistics of Fountains - Stewart Hicks - This one is just fun. 😊

The Genius of 2x4 Framing - Stewart Hicks - So apparently the US is a bit odd in how much of our architectural/construction industry uses light wood framing as a standard.

The B1M - Hosted by Fred Mills (British), more generally about construction, rather than just architecture

Why America Is Tearing Down Its Highways - The B1M - Explores the history of the interstate highway system, and how much of it was used for redlining and general segregation, along with the challenges faced by the plans to tear those highways down.

The $1.2 Trillion Plan to Rebuild America - The B1M - NGL I'm like. Ludicrously excited about this one. There's a lot going on! I hope it works out!

Why a Billionaire Tried to Stop This Bridge - The B1M - There's a new bridge being built between Detroit, MI and Windsor, ON. This bridge is going to help with the ongoing trade between the US and Canada; these two cities are already a major hub for one of the largest trading partnerships in the world (the largest where one side is not the European Union), so building another bridge is a reasonable undertaking. However, the new bridge will be just a few miles down from an existing bridge that is currently owned by a billionaire who makes a killing over his control of a major portion of this bottleneck of the trade route. (Also, more engineering challenges!)

The Statue of Liberty: Building an Icon - The B1M - Someone actually asked me about this recently and anyway you should all go learn about how the Statue of Liberty happened, she's a gem.

Why New York’s Billionaires’ Row Is Half Empty - The B1M- The usage of NYC luxury housing as a semi-liquid asset used as investment by the megarich, along with the rights acquisitions that led to their building in the first place, the gentrification they contribute to, and the tax write-offs they get for it.

Why Our Cities Are So Expensive - The B1M - How infrastructure investment by governments can and does frequently lead to gentrification. Focuses on London's Battersea Power Station revitalization plan.

Why New York's Skyscrapers Keep Changing Shape - The B1M - This is actually an exploration of more than just New York, covering much of the same topics as the above 'history of skyscraper design' video, with a great focus on the Chrysler building.

Why No One Wants This New York Skyscraper - The B1M - Investigates the ways in which the development of Two World Trade Center has been delayed over the past decade and change, along with a handful of other projects in the area.

The Wild Story of New York’s Abandoned Skyscraper - The B1M - There's a half-finished skyscraper on the western shore of Manhattan, and due to the errors in laying the foundation, there's an 8cm tilt in it. The parties involved in construction are duking it out in court about who's at fault, and until they're done, that thing is just... sitting there.

New York's Latest $3BN Skyscraper Explained - The B1M - Another stupidly tall skyscraper for midtown. You know. Because we need another one.

The $7BN Plan to Save New York's Most Hated Train Station - The B1M - Explores the history, current state, and planned upgrades to Penn Station of NYC.

New York's Most Hated Highway is Falling Apart - The B1M - The issues hitting the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and the difficulties in repairing it.

The Secret Subway That Could Save New York - The B1M - Hey do you want to hear about how we might finally be getting that Queens-Brooklyn line that doesn't need to pass through Manhattan first?

The Tunnel That's Failing New York City - The B1M - The tunnel that handles a massive amount of the human traffic between NJ and NYC is starting to break down due to age. This one included a line that actually gave me feelings: "Look, it's a 110-year-old system, you know, it's done its job. Like, we really can't ask any more of it." It did its best! For a long time! Thank you!

The US Government Wants to Destroy These Towers - The B1M - The federal government just wants to demolish some Historic Skyscrapers in Chicago, no biggie.

The Secret $4BN Tunnel Network Under Chicago - The B1M - Since the 1970s, Chicago has been building an absolutely massive set of tunnels hundreds of feet under the surface to handle regular flooding from storms and the climate crisis.

The Fight to Fix the Tilting Millennium Tower - The B1M - There's this skyscraper in San Francisco that's leaning a few centimeters to the side, which doesn't sound like a lot, until you learn that just a few more will mean the plumbing and elevators stop working.

The £100BN Railway Dividing a Nation - The B1M - Goes over the political, economic, and environmental arguments and concerns behind the highspeed rail intended to connect London to the North of England.

Inside London's £19BN New Railway (and its Nightmare Station) - The B1M - Genuinely fascinated at the number of Train Problems that England seems to be having.

Why Europe Doesn't Build Skyscrapers - The B1M - Explains the historical and modern reasons that limit the addition of supertall buildings across most of Europe.

The Insane Scale of Europe's New Mega-Tunnel - The B1M - Explores the engineering and environmental challenges of the Fehmarntunnel, a passage from Germany to Denmark of terrifying size.

Why Europe is Building a 57KM Tunnel Through a Mountain - The B1M - No, a different one. This one is between Italy and France.

We Went Inside the Largest Nuclear Fusion Reactor - The B1M - It's in France, there are over 35 countries involved, and it's just a Lot.

Inside The Lab That Tests Elevator Free-Falls - The B1M - There's this active mine in Finland where they test elevators for safety and it's pretty cool.

Finland Might Have Solved Nuclear Power’s Biggest Problem - The B1M - Finland has a new way of storing nuclear waste.

Nord Stream 2: The $11BN Megaproject That's Dividing - The B1M - It's an oil pipeline and it is causing problems for Everyone.

Why Russia is Building an Arctic Silk Road - The B1M - Russia is taking advantage of the melting ice caps to set up a new trade route through the arctic so shipping can go up through the north instead of down around South Asia and through the Suez Canal.

The $10BN Railway in the Jungle - The B1M - Mexico is building a new, very long high-speed rail line, and it's incredibly controversial.

Hong Kong's $11BN Underwater Railway Explained - The B1M - Hong Kong is putting in a new underwater tunnel (as part of a larger network expansion) for its subway system, and it's. Difficult.

China's Skyscraper Boom is Officially Over - The B1M - Just learned that China is outlawing most skyscrapers. There are a few cases where you can still maybe make one happen, if you can convince the government it's needed, but in most cases... nah. They're cutting you off.

The Unstoppable Growth of China's High-Speed Rail Network - The B1M - [insert gif screaming about trains here]

The Insane Engineering of Tokyo's First Supertall Skyscraper - The B1M - While the focus is ostensibly Main Tower, the video covers a lot of ground regarding earthquakes and the necessary engineering to resist the incredibly frequent occurrence. (Warning: Came out shortly after the Feb. 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquake, and contains references to the event, urging people contribute what they could to help. The video was already almost finished when the Turkey-Syria earthquake happened, and rather than delay it for fear of it being in bad taste, they decided to use it to encourage people to help the victims.)

Japan’s $64BN Gamble on Levitating Bullet Trains Explained - The B1M - Let's talk about maglev, pros and cons.

Is This Asia's Next Financial Capital? - The B1M - Malaysia is building a lot, and it might herald a new financial superpower for the continent and the world.

Why India Doesn’t Build Skyscrapers - The B1M - The short answer is 'zoning laws that didn't achieve what the legislators hoped,' but it's changing.

The $4BN Railway Reshaping Delhi - The B1M - What it says on the tin.

The World's Most Extreme Construction Site - The B1M - Antarctica!!!

Egypt Built a Supertall Skyscraper in the Desert - The B1M - Egypt is straight up building an entire city in the middle of nowhere, primarily as a new seat of government, because Cairo is overcrowded... and a frequent site of protests.

Top 10 Projects Completing in 2023 - The B1M - Some impressive, expensive, and possibly unnecessary projects that are happening.

Tomorrow's Build is a second channel under The B1M, also hosted by Fred Mills. It's more focused on hypothetical, future projects than ongoing ones.

Barcelona’s Car-Free Superblocks Explained - Tomorrow's Build - Barcelona is planning to block off entire parts of the city from most car usage, excepting local delivery, mass transit, and emergency services.

The Hidden Crisis With Renewable Energy - Tomorrow's Build - Storage of energy from renewable sources that are not consistently available (e.g. solar is only available when the sun is out) is difficult, so here are a few options.

This Nuclear Plant is Built in 3 Months - Tomorrow's Build - Mail-order nuclear power is going to be a thing.

Greece is Turning its Olympic Ruins into a Casino - Tomorrow's Build - [good for them dot gif]

This Could Stop Construction Everywhere - Tomorrow's Build - So it turns out we're running out of sand. Which is important, because we need sand for concrete, and the easiest stuff to get (desert sand), doesn't work for that, which is why Dubai has to import sand for construction. So uh. Kind of a crisis. Sand pirates are a whole thing.

Architectural Digest - channel for the architectural magazine that dates back to 1920

Architect Breaks Down 5 of the Most Common New York Apartments - Architectural Digest - Just what it says on the tin! An architect explains brownstones, classics, railroad apartments, and loft/studio apartments. Lots of history, specifically that of the late 19th century tenement buildings and the art community and subsequent gentrification of SoHo.

Architect Breaks Down 6 Luxury Apartments from Billions, Gossip Girl & More - Architectural Digest - On the other end of NYC housing, we got the Rich People Places.

Architect Breaks Down Secret Details Of The Chrysler Building - Architectural Digest - An exploration of the external details of the Chrysler, with commentary on the historical context of art deco and related art movements.

Architect Breaks Down 3 Demolished New York Landmarks - Architectural Digest - Goes over the original Penn Station, Madison Square Garden,and the New York Herald building.

Architect Breaks Down The Evolving Skyscrapers Of New - Architectural Digest - I'm... not going to pretend I'm less than obsessed with NYC videos. Sorry! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Covers setback/wedding cake tiered, glass curtain wall, plaza towers, expressed structures, and the (hated) supertall.

Architect Breaks Down NYC Subway Stations (Oldest & Newest) - Architectural Digest - And we continue on NYC infrastructure history because I am insatiable.

Architect Explores New York City's Greenwich Village | Walking Tour - Architectural Digest - What a beautiful and inconvenient neighborhood, full of so many dead bodies.

Top Luxury - Despite the name, is about construction in general, including critique of megearich projects, so don't go in expecting it to be About The Luxury

World's Most Useless Megaprojects - Top Luxury - Did you know there are entire cities lying around empty? I already knew that, but there are just. So many giant projects that never got finished, ate up a lot of money, and are just kind of sitting around now.

5 Skyscrapers that Never Existed - Top Luxury - Some of these never got past the concept stage, and some ran out of funding, and at least one got turned into a fish farm by locals after it was abandoned.

Biggest Megaprojects in the World - Top Luxury - Exactly what it says on the tin! Guys, there are so many giant projects happening, and so many of them are controversial As Heck.

Why these Megacities are Still Empty - Top Luxury - Not entirely empty, but yeah, there are some megacities designed for one purpose or another that are more Ghost Town than Bustling Metropolis. Other than Naypyidaw, though, most of them are expected to gain larger populations soon, particularly Nusantara (which is being built specifically due to the sinking of Jakarta).

The Most Terrifying Bridges in the World - Top Luxury - Like half of these are in a specific region of China that just has. So many mountains.

Most Expensive Construction Mistakes in the World (Part 3) - Top Luxury - Have you ever fucked up so incredibly that it cost six billion USD to fix?

Not Just Bikes - Canadian living in Europe; city planning with focus on N. American car-centric zoning

Why City Design is Important (and Why I Hate Houston) - Not Just Bikes - Do you want more ammo to show people when they try to argue with you about walkable cities?

America Always Gets This Wrong (when building transit) - Not Just Bikes - How zoning and city planning needs to adjust in order for mass transit to actually work for people.

Suburbs that don't Suck - Streetcar Suburbs (Riverdale, Toronto) - Not Just Bikes - So there actually are good suburbs in the US and Canada, we just can't build them anymore because zoning laws make it impossible.

Stroads are Ugly, Expensive, and Dangerous (and they're everywhere) - Not Just Bikes - So there's this really popular and horrible form of street/road in the US and Canada that is bad at its job.

Would You Fall for It? - Not Just Bikes - 1950s pro-highway propaganda (which is referenced in many other videos from this channel), and the ways in which it was misleading and effective.

These Stupid Trucks are Literally Killing Us - Not Just Bikes - This video actually did numbers on tumblr a few months ago. You know those stupidly big SUVs and Pick-ups? Yeah! They suck!

Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud - Not Just Bikes - With a few small changes, you too could live in a city that doesn't make you want to wear noise-cancelling headphones every moment of the day.

IT'S HISTORY - Various historic places... mostly NYC

Why can't you visit the Statue of Liberty's Torch? - IT'S HISTORY - Has some confusing image choices (photos from the early 20th century while talking about events from the 18th), but delivers on a fun history of the Statue of Liberty (and includes some facts that the other Lady Liberty video didn't get around to).

What's Left of New York's Lost Reservoir? - IT'S HISTORY - Apparently it turned into Bryant Park.

When Chicago built the Tallest Building in the World | The story of Sears Tower - IT'S HISTORY - Just what it says on the tin.. Big building, big history!

The Secret Tunnels Beneath New York - IT'S HISTORY - NYC has lost so many tunnels? Lost track of, forgotten, rediscovered... it's ridiculous. Half of these are for TRAINS. Those are HUGE. Led to me making this post (which contains a meme or two, but also a very important trigger warning).

Other

The lost neighborhood under New York's Central Park - Vox - Explains the history of Seneca Village: a primarily-black community of newly wealthy, often first-generation-freed peoples that was destroyed to make way for Central Park.

The Rise and Fall of American Malls - Bloomberg Originals - Covers the factors that led to malls becoming so common, and the many things that are contributing to the move away from them.

Megastructures: Building the Burj Al Arab | Dubai Engineering - Reel Truth Science Documentaries - This is fifty minutes of engineering and architecture, and really well done/presented. Mostly steers clear of the larger political controversy in favor of focusing on the math, though it can't entirely avoid the political and economic conflicts due to direct influence on the design by a the Crown Prince.

Why Venice is Europe’s Worst Placed City - Real Life Lore - We all know Venice is sinking, but this explains why and how (it's not just global climate change).

Why Wyoming is VASTLY Emptier Than Colorado - Real Life Lore - More of a general history lesson than architecture, but still fun.

Why Engineers Can't Control Rivers - Practical Engineering - I've had a few classes touch on this topic, but it was mostly back in high school. This video has some really good visualization on the main elements, and addresses that there are some places working on actual fixes!

Why Construction Projects Always Go Over Budget - Practical Engineering - Goes over the process by which costs are estimated, the limitations of those processes, and the risks that inevitably force the budget higher.

Czechia's Incredible 1960s Supervillain-Lair Hotel (And Why Its Architect Got Banned By The Regime) - The Tim Traveller - There's this really cool hotel that recently got refurbished.

Why Egypt Is Building a New Capital City - neo - Another video on the new city in Egypt, but with more in-depth exploration of the specific planning choices (where certain buildings are, especially).

The Forgotten Story of Modulex: LEGO's Lost Cousin - Peter Dibble - LEGO had a brand called Modulex that was used for architecture and city planning for a few decades. These days they mostly do signage.

Why Airplanes Are Still Worth Millions After They Stop Flying - CNBC - The various ways planes are broken down, sold for parts, and otherwise recycled.

[newsfromsomewhere]

 Although never built, the design for the Maison d’Artiste  - created in 1923 by painter Theo van Doesburg and architect Cornelis van -  is one of the key works of the Dutch avant-garde movement De Stijl. An Unfinished Icon by De Stijl explores the revolutionary cultural importance of the design, its significance for the history of De Stijl and its place in a history of the unbuilt architecture of the 20th century.

[100hands]

Our competition entry for Takshila's Sports Institute has been published on Architecture Live!

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Architecture has always begun with a drawing.

Music, as we know, begins with a score.

In this manner, both architecture and music have completed a work.

Architectural drawings and musical scores live a life of perfect solitude even if in a drawer or an attic.

Their future is yet to come.

Strangely enough, people cannot conceive of architecture or music without a physical performance.

One can build a building and yet wind up without any architecture.

A composer may write a score which may never be performed, but it's lack of being performed does not disqualify it as a piece of music.

Herein lies the paradox of unbuilt and unperformed works.

They live their own existence, oblivious to time.

The power of a drawing and its creative force does not lie merely in its use as a tool for practical purposes.

It lies in the beholder's imagination.

A drawing might lodge itself in the mind and build itself to great heights within it.

Beethoven composed his last works without physically hearing them played.

He heard them in his mind; in his being.

So, too, architecture.

The contents of architectural drawings, be they realised or not, can enter the imagination of the public.

Drawings thereby inscribe themselves as pro-jests: future actions.

Just like music, an architectural drawing can wait a long time before revealing itself.

Bach's scores lay for some 200 years, unplayed and unperformed, until Mendelssohn rediscovered them and made them public through performance.

Piranesi built only one building; Chernikhov built none - yet their creations are seminal to the history and production of architecture.

Architectural drawings have and will continue to act as a spur to the built world.

Daniel Libeskind