In an alternate reality, a half-mile-diameter dome would enclose much of Manhattan. The dome would regulate the city’s temperature and reduce energy consumption, according to the man behind the plan, R. Buckminster Fuller. Titled “Noah’s Ark #2”, the fantastical idea actually found a sponsor and the idea went through preliminary feasibility studies.

This is just one of the 200 unbuilt projects for New York City included in Never Built New York, a new book published by Metropolis Books. Authored by Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell, the book is a follow-up to their popular edition Never Built Los Angeles, and documents unbuilt plans for towers, bridges, parks and airports from the outrageous to the banal. 

An 1870 project by Rufus Henry Gilbert sounds a bit like Elon Musk’s Hyperloop: a series of elevated, pneumatic tubes would propel passengers across the city. Suspended in tall Gothic arches, the tubes would be powered by compressed air.

The Museum of Modern Art building in New York carries the traces of quite a few architects, most recently Diller, Scofidio and Renfro. It’s hard to say whether this 1930 proposal, by Howe and Lescaze, would have required as many renovations. A series of stacked cube-shaped galleries crowned with a streamline moderne viewing platform, the proposal called with marble-clad walls and white-glazed structural bricks.

Victor Gruen, the architect best-known as the inventor of the modern shopping mall, almost built a giant housing development on what is currently called Roosevelt Island. The project would have comprised a 22 ft tall, two-level platform with a series of 8 to 50-story apartment towers. Responding to mass housing shortages, the project would have accommodated up to 70,000 people.

Pick up a copy of Never Built New York here.