Atlas of Never Built Architecture

Lubell and Goldin (coauthors of Never Built Los Angeles) team up for a visually stunning if shallow compendium of 345 architectural projects that never made it off the drawing board. Spanning from the 20th century to the present day, the featured projects include Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1957 “Plan for Greater Baghdad,” a collection of buildings centered by a spherical opera house, which was scrapped when the government commissioning the project was overthrown in a military coup; J.J.P. Oud’s 1931 Blijdorp Housing in the Netherlands, which introduced the idea of the apartment complex but proved too expensive to build; and Kengo Kuma’s 2014 Museum of Indigenous Knowledge in Manila, a five-story structure supported by an artificial cave full of vegetation, which was rejected when the foundation who’d commissioned it demanded a high-rise component. The drawings are beautiful and many of the projects are architecturally fascinating, but the authors don’t explain their selection process or meaningfully connect the entries, making for an account that can feel somewhat flat and disconnected. The result is an intriguing but incomplete survey. Illus. (Sept.)