Our research assignment this week is to find two examples of "Unbuilt Architecture". These are the overlooked, often forgotten, maybe ahead of their time, sometimes understated or just plain un-buildable artifacts of Architectural History that line the pages of Journals, research papers, books and competition retrospectives, and it will be our major task for this semester to finally realise one of these, albeit in digital form.
Coming to the Architectural Computing degree from straight Architecture there are about 50 projects that suddenly come to mind and fill me with excitement by getting the opportunity to finally see one of them "finished". However, we are limited to just one, so below I will outline the pros and cons for constructing my top two "projects that should have been built... but weren't".
Unbuilt Architecture One
La Ville Contemporaine (Le Corbusier)
Pros:
- Well known project,
- Would make use of Crysis' large scale maps,
- Potential as a base for urban analysis,
Cons:
- Very large scale, could be difficult to model,
- Large scale could overpower the individual scale experience (not seeing trees for the forest, or modelling them!)
- Lack of decent documentation for all types of buildings
Unbuilt Architecture Two
Cénotaphe de Newton (Etienne-Louis Boullée)
Pros:
- An architectural cornerstone
- Geometrically simple to model
- Large scale
Cons:
- Too simple to model?
- Circular nature could create a lot of polys
- Not much documentation about the "human scale" side of the design
- Where do you put it? Context?
