Unbuilt tells the stories of plans, drawings and proposals conceived during the twentieth century, an unparalleled era of architectural optimism.
 
Many of these grand projects never left the drawing board. Some were unbuildable fantasies; in other cases, test structures or parts of buildings emerged in the real world. The book features work by Buckminster Fuller, Geoffrey Bawa, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Archigram, alongside contemporary architects including Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, Will Alsop and Rem Koolhaas.
 
Richly illustrated with photographs, drawings, maps, collages and models from around the world, it ranges from Buckminster Fuller's plan for a domed city in Manhattan to Le Corbusier's utopian dream of high-rise living in central Paris, and from a proposed motorway network through central London to a fantastical scheme for undulating roadways in postwar Berlin.
 
This important book offers not only rich histories of what our built environment might have become, but insight into architects' motivations and dreams: sometimes to create a better world, sometimes to indulge their egos. It includes boundary-pushing proposals for plug-in cities, walking cities, space cities, domes and floating cities, as well as maglev, teleportation and rockets. Many ideas were ahead of their time; others, fortunately, were never realised.