Read on Twitter
THREAD: Unbuilt projects proposed for London could make a whole city themselves, and i just love to imagine “what if”... here is “Watkin’s Folly” a tower taller than the Eiffel that was partially built in Wembley, never finished, then torn down https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-england-50628714
The London Millenium Tower proposal was for a gargantuan, but super unusual double-ellipse-plan curving 386 metre superskyscraper by Norman Foster on the site of what later became the Gherkin. English Heritage actually enthusiastically supported the scheme...
I always thought it was a real shame that we never got a tower by Will Alsop before he passed. Here’s his collaboration with Bruce McLean at 151 City Road that nearly happened, but instead became ‘that’ crazy hotel by Squire & Partners
The Imperial Monumental Halls & Tower was a rather glorious 1904 proposal 4 a 164 metre ultra-gothic supertower by John Pollard Seddon and Edward Beckitt Lamb in Westminster that was to contain the overflow of memorials and monumemts from Westminster Abbey https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Monumental_Halls_and_Tower
Rather happily never built over Primrose Hill (where I like to walk my dog) was the all-in-one solution to London’s pressing 19th C burial needs, the 90 storey, 290 meter high Metropolitan Sepulchre that would have housed 5,167,104 dead Londoners https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Sepulchre
After the death pyramid, here is a gloriously erotic ode to life from the completely so-brilliant-they-should-have-built-loads-more-stuff Future Systems, their Green Bird skyscraper project for Battersea, south London, from those heady millenium days in 1998
And boy do I wish their Routemaster concept for London buses had won out over Heatherwicks’s death sauna design...
A rather fantastic piece of recycling, this was Charles Burton‘s proposal for keeping the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, but rebuilding its metal and glass kit-of-parts by Paxton into a spectacular crystaline tower 300metres tall (nearly the height of the Shard)
In 1961 a group of architects known as the ‘Glass Age Development Committee’, appropriately funded by Pilkington Plate Glass, proposed the Crystal 61, a 300 metre high vertical conference centre with 5 stacked halls near St Pancras. See here for more info: https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/category/unbuilt-london/page/2/
The same architects proposed the Crystal Span inhabited bridge over the Thames, a kind of Festival of Britain era old London Bridge but full of fun retail and spectacle. I remember falling in love with the idea at the RA’s Living Bridges exhibition https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2017/05/06/unbuilt-london-the-crystal-span-bridge/
The great Zaha Hadid who participated in that wonderful Royal Academy show on Living Bridges, was always interested in the idea, with her graduation thesis project from 1976-7 at the Architectural Association being a proposal for a 14 storey hotel-bridge over the Thames...
4 grandiose sentiment Rem Koolhaas’ (2gether with Madelon Vreisendorp, EliaZenghelis, & Zoe Zenghelis) 1972 AA student thesis ‘Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture’, can’t b beaten, with its Berlin-Wall inspired proposal 2 carve London up with a linear megastructure
I am a huge, huge fan of Cesar Pelli’s pristinely shimmering Canada Tower, but a teeny little part of me does wonder how spectacularly Gotham-like this previous version of the main Canary Wharf tower by Kohn Pedersen Fox would have been...
Seifert & Partners proposed the rather exceptionally ahead-of-its time London International Press Centre in 1967, left. Sadly it eventually shrunk & shrivelled into the building on the right
This is Theo Crosby’s proposal for an uber-Pomo 150 metre tall Battle of Britain War Memorial near Surrey Docks, 1988
Viñoly isn’t a much loved figure in British architecture, but there was a real sci-fi flair to the 300m tall superchimney skyscraper that he proposed in Battersea, whose vast hollow core drew all the hot air from the vast development up through itself 2 generate electricity, 2008
I was quite saddened when in 2016 Southwark council rejected this proposal for ‘Gagarin Tower’ by Studio 44, a rocket-shaped skyscraper designed as a homage to astronaut Yuri Gagarin. Ba humbug commentariat architects at the time called it ‘too literal’
My favourite proposal for Battersea Power Station was by Terry Farrell (note I am a bit biased as I used to work for him), where the bulk of the building was shored up and retained as a vast ruin in the middle of a new park.
Future Sustems again, this time with their 1985 competition proposal for a site on Trafalgar Square. None of the entries for the plot were used as it quickly became Prince Charles’ trad-era and the existing building was subsequently death-masked https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2016/05/28/unbuilt-london-the-trafalgar-square-blob/
I was a big fan of Renzo Piano’s elegant cylindrical tower that was 2b built in Paddington (metres from where I was born no less 
) until a trad campaign got it replaced with the humingous hulking mega-cube beast of a building thats short but with more floor area which is UC now
) until a trad campaign got it replaced with the humingous hulking mega-cube beast of a building thats short but with more floor area which is UC now
This curvaceous piece of shwooping brutalism from 1968 was the first design for the Penta Hotel on Cromwell Road by Seifert & Partners, which would have been quite an amazing silhouette on the London skyline. Sadly a much more standard tower design was built...
Thanks to @EwanMHarrison (an expert) for reminding me of this...
