Even though Swedish architecture firm Jågnefålt Milton didn’t win first place in the competition to design a master plan for the Norwegian city of Åndalsnes, their proposal was innovative enough to snag third. What Jågnefålt Milton proposed is to prefabricate chunks of buildings and roll them through the city on rail tracks, focusing the development of the town in concentrated ribbons of existing (and some new) infrastructure. In the winter, just roll your house somewhere sunny and in the summer, roll your house somewhere breezy. It’s radically different from the the other proposals and the renderings are straightforward, but at the same time it’s curious and interesting to see small pieces of architecture just hanging out along the tracks.

Alex

These images of the Teshima Art Museum are from the website of the italian architecture magazine Domus. The museum is a collaboration between half of the Pritzker-Prize winning firm SANAA (that half being Ryue Nishizawa) and the artist Rei Naito. If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you may remember Bobby posting a video of another Sanaa project back in March when their selection for the 2010 Prizker Prize was announced. The video he posted features the Rolex Learning Center, which, formally, is the most obvious predecessor to the Teshima Art Museum.

But there are differences. Tucked on top of a hill on the Japanese island of Teshima, the museum is unlike most art museums– unlike most buildings– in that it doesn’t treat the outside as a source of contamination and is completely open. This is because of the art work that the architecture serves: a piece by Naito called Matrix, relies on wind that enters the two large oculi to animate drops of water on the floor. But the form of the building also comes from water, according to an interview with Naito:

“My work will be inside the building. I wouldn’t exactly call it an art museum. It’s shaped like a falling water drop. There are no [columns] and it’s a large concrete building, about 40 meters wide. My work will essentially be composed of water on the floor. We work together so he asks me what do you want to do and I ask him what do you want to do. While listening to each other we consider the wider surroundings on the island”

It’s a beautiful consideration, and with photographs this stunning (the photographer is Iwan Baan, no surprise) we can only imagine the ephemeral experience of standing between the huge holes in an expansive drop of concrete and the smaller drops of water on the floor.

Alex

We’re still talking about unbuilt projects right? Here’s another gem: the Viva Hotel and Casino designed by Bruce Goff in 1961. If you’re lucky enough to live in L.A., you may have visited Goff’s Pavilion for Japanese Art at LACMA. I came across the perspective rendering (above) of the Viva Hotel and Casino while shopping for postcards at the Art Institute Chicago. (Between here and here, the Institute has around 150 images of Goff’s work available to view online. Much more of his work is tucked away in archival boxes.) Because his work is often described as organic, I tend to associate Goff with predecessor Gaudi, and I was reminded of Goff’s unbuilt hotel when helpful reader DS posted a link to this article about reviving an unbuilt Gaudi hotel at Ground Zero.

Alex

Below are some other Goff drawings in the Art Institute Chicago collection.

Maybe it’s a product of the architecture firms where I’ve worked, or maybe it’s because of economic conditions that have persisted since I entered and graduated from architecture school, but most of the projects I’ve worked on have been shelved, canned, or axed. I think this is likely true for most architects and may explain explain why I (and others) have an affinity for unbuilt projects. In some instances, the projects are unbuildable by design; but other projects are aborted thanks to someone’s hubris other than the architect. So this week I thought we’d look at projects that didn’t quite make it.

One of my favorite unbuilt projects is the Monument to the Third International by Vladimir Tatlin. The highlight of the structure, for me, is the rotating geometric volumes inside the helix: each one a different shape, each one a different function and each one rotating at a different speed. To be clear, these are building-sized chunks of his project rotating like a giant clock. It sounds like something from Dubai, but this was 1919 in recently-revolutionized Russia.

What is your favorite unbuilt project?

Alex