Many of the projects in the seminal Unbuilt America are self-conscious, utopian provocations meant to redirect architecture and society. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, published in English in 1974, became a touchstone for the power of the lyrical imaginary, “a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms.” 8 The invention of the unbuilt, as its own genre within architectural history, coincides with this cultural moment: chastened yet hopeful, celebrating the marginal the alternate, the poetic, and the experimental. For those concerned with the built environment, recession, ecologism, and preservationism had put the brakes on modernist schemes and hubris, for worse and for better. is shifting by necessity, from construction to reconsideration, reclamation, recycling and redevelopment … this whole new wave of introspection.” 7 By 1976 America was halfway through a decade of economic distress, diminished expectations, and in recovery from political trauma and social division. Sky and Stone historicized the context for their recuperation of “forgotten dreams.” 6 “The emphasis in the U.S. The 300-page book, with nearly 500 images, gathered together scores of unbuilt projects, historical and contemporary, by designers famous and obscure organized from A to Z Raimund Abraham to Robert Zion. SITE’s interdisciplinary project engendered Sky and Stone’s research into Unbuilt America, and was funded by NEA, Kress, Graham, and Rockefeller foundation grants. The authors of Unbuilt America, Alison Sky, an art historian and artist, and Michelle Stone, a photographer and sociologist, had been founders in 1969, along with architect James Wines, of Sculpture in the Environment (SITE). Architectural historian George Collins observed in the 1976 introduction to the the seminal Unbuilt America, “Little study seems to have been made of the history of the unbuilt as such … neither the history of worldwide Unbuilt nor of Unbuilt America has really ever been written.” 5 The unbuilt has its own historiography. The unbuilt as a distinct genre, worthy of separate attention in its own right, appeared still later, not until the 1970s. The unbuilt helped modernism appear as a subterranean, oppositional movement bubbling to the surface. 4 The eccentric, often utopian schemes’ spatiality, abstractions, and aspirations, seemingly so unlike what was erected in their time, provided a genealogy for historians’ twentieth-century modernisms. 3Īfter the Second World War some architectural historians, beginning with Emil Kaufmann and followed by Vincent Scully and Manfredo Tafuri, sought modern architecture’s roots in the eighteenth-century unbuilt of Piranesi, Boullée, and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux.
Frothingham’s A History of Architecture (1906-1915) to Henry Millon’s Key Monuments of the History of Architecture (1964) today’s famous unbuilts were all but invisible. Peter’s project or Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s seventeenth-century Louvre scheme. Before the mid-twentieth-century, histories of architecture were accounts of the built, not the unbuilt, save for rarities like Donato Bramante’s early sixteenth-century St. But it is demonstrably not true that architectural historians have always valued the unbuilt. Writing on the unbuilt typically asserts an eternal human interest in the theme, harking back to the Tower of Babel. What are its characteristics and history? How does it relate to architectural practice and the built? And, for architectural history, what are the stakes of the unbuilt? Why does it matter? What might it do? In this essay I want to examine more critically this category of the unbuilt.
“Blueprints of the Modern Imagination” subtitles Visionary Architecture by Neil Spiller. Here the unbuilt drives the story of twentieth-century design. For several generations now, historians have filled their accounts of modern architecture with the unbuilt of Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Étienne-Louis Boullée, Tony Garnier and Antonio Sant’Elia, the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the Russian Constructivists, Le Corbusier and Archigram. More generally though the unbuilt undergirds architectural history’s master narratives. Mark Osbaldeston, Unbuilt Toronto: The City That Might Have Been (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2008).
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