We have seen it infinite times on movies, pictures and felt it from songs, books and articles, and the City of New York has always transmitted the same kind of vibrations throughout the history even though it is now an incredibly evolved and different city than it was back in the 60’s or the 80’s.
The exhibition «Never Built New York« at the Queens Museum (and its book) shows us how the same city could have architecturally been if a bunch of proposed plans and projects, by the strongest designers and architects from all around the world, had been materialized, constructed, built…
Visiting the exhibition was amazing and so exciting for me since we do not find such a big architectural one every day around the corner. It was probably not as well and carefully curated as the biggest exhibitions at the MoMa or the MET, but the concept was interesting and the show was for sure interesting to at least all the architectural community.
In a large and elongated room with the shape of Manhattan, the different exhibits where shown and located where they should have been built so the visitor can go through the space and see the jobs as he/she walks from Downtown to Uptown, just like moving by that imaginary but really proposed New York.
An interesting detail was to see and read how many amazing projects ended up in that room instead of becoming true because of moments or incidents like the «crack of 1929«, the «attacks of 9/11» or the «2007 economic crisis«.
A lot more obviously happened, but here we could see selected designs and projects by many American and European architects, those we studied at our careers, starting from legends like Frank Lloyd Wright, passing by American contemporary icons such as Peter Eisenman, Richard Meier, Steven Holl or Daniel Libeskind, to European «starchitects» like Rem Koolhaas or Zaha Hadid.
Very happy to have seen the event at its last day of open exhibition, would strongly recommend to all the community to check out the book as it shows all these and more Never Built projects in New York City.
