Dubbed the Hotel Attraction (according to Matamala’s recollection), Gaudí proposed a parabolic skyscraper towering over the city at 360 meters. It would have been the tallest building in the world until the completion of the Empire State Building.

The exact location for the proposed tower is unknown, but a group of architects and historians argued that it was intended for the site of the first World Trade Center towers and put it forward for the Ground Zero memorial design competition in 2003. — The Daily Beast

Shortly after the 2013 Unbuilt Visions competition concluded, d3 hosted the Unbuilt Visions exhibition showcasing some of the winning entries at the TSMD Turkish Architectural Center in Ankara from Jan. 7-21, 2014. — bustler.net

d3 announced four Grand Prize winners and 11 Special Mentions in the 2013 Unbuilt Visions competition. The program recognizes excellence in unbuilt projects to promote critical debate about architecture and design. — bustler.net

If San Franciscans like to describe their city as “49 square miles surrounded by reality,” the visionary ideas that were too grandiose for even San Franciscans to consider remain some of the most fantastic designs for any city in the world. Imagine a grand casino on Alcatraz, the city wrapped in freeways and a subdivision covering flattened hills north of the Golden Gate Bridge. — Architecture and the City Festival

Three Grand Prize winners and thirteen Special Mentions have been announced in d3's Unbuilt Visions 2012 competition. The program promotes critical debate about architecture and design by acknowledging excellence in unbuilt projects. — bustler.net

Orhan Ayyüce published parts 1 + 2 of a multi-part interview with George Brugmans (Executive Director of the IABR)...Thayer-D chimed in "This is an excellent example of how well intentioned architects continue to talk past each other...One of the speakers spoke of the need to create relationships with politicians, developers and the public in general to forge a new way forward...What's amazing is that this has been happening for the last 20 years in the Congress for New Urbanism

It all leads one to ponder the what-if Los Angeles, to imagine the city that would exist today if the best proposals for remedying its ailments had been realized. Los Angeles would now include a ring of thousands of acres of urban and regional parks, a bold, space-age airport, a winged nature center for Griffith Park and hillside housing developments sculpted to the contours of the landscape rather than sitting on graded and terraced scars. We would be living in a very different city. — latimes.com

Produced as a diploma project in 1928, it justified itself by pointing out – as generations of environmentalists would later insist – the need to minimise human impact on the planet. Except rather than treading lightly on it, we wouldn't be treading on it at all, but living in flying mobile homes, which could dock at collective housing, hotels, factories and leisure centres, able to descend to the earth to enjoy it unspoilt. — guardian.co.uk

Economic and social factors across the ages meant that some of the grandest designs of renowned architects such as Lutyens and Inigo Jones were never completed.

Here are five ambitious building projects that never made it off the drawing-board. — bbc.co.uk

The exhibit also has models of grandiose never-built projects, like converting more than 62 acres of what's now Foggy Bottom into "The National Galleries of History and Art".

"Nothing in the built environment is inevitable," commented Moeller, senior vice president of the National Building Museum. "It's very unpredictable. There are some accidents. Often as not, things don't go according to plan." — examiner.com