By Ben Panko
smithsonian.com
From a gigantic airport, to an urbanized Ellis Island, the show reveals the many fascinating ideas for New York City that never made it off the page.
New York City has offered many an architect a canvas to paint soaring wonders of construction and design. But in the shadows of every executed idea are scores that never made it off the drawing pad. Now, a new exhibit is exploring some of those fantastical and ambitious creations, Jenna Scherer reports for Curbed New York.
"Exploring the alternative paths New York City could have traveled encourages us to think beyond the present tense and push the boundaries of what the future of the metropolis holds," the Queens Museum writes in a description for "Never Built New York," on view until February 2018. The exhibit, co-curated by Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin, is full of historic photographs, diagrams and models, giving visitors a glimpse of the "parallel metropolis" that New York could have been.
These designs came from everywhere, even cocktail napkins. According to Will Heinrich of the New York Times, one of the objects on display is a napkin from the city's iconic Plaza Hotel, which contains a sketch made by legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright just months before his death. The sketch was a plan to redevelop Ellis Island, the gateway for millions of American immigrants that had recently closed, into a futuristic "city of tomorrow" comprising towers, domes and parks.
Like the cocktail napkin, many of the curated items imagine the city with a futuristic eye, playing on ideas to harness the power of advancing technology in creative ways. Decades before the famed New York Subway opened, for instance, the exhibition shines a light on Alfred Ely Beach's proposed system of underground tubes. As Scherer reports for Curbed, the idea was to rocket people around in cars pushed by giant fans, building on engineering advances in the field of pneumatics. Think of it as a proto-Hyperloop.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/see-buildings-new-york-couldve-had-180964990/#uZydqJ4DVZUxQbHW.99
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