Grand town plans which never happened

There was no post last week because it felt inappropriate with everything going on in the news. The focus is now turning from rescue to cleaning up and rebuilding. There is a great opportunity to build a modern city which can bring NZ up to first world standards. Let’s hope young and talented town planners and architects have a say in the future of Christchurch.

Hopefully it doesn’t turn out like some of the following grand plans which never came to be (or even worse another city like Auckland).

Volkshalle was one of Adolf Hitler’s failed plans. It was going to be a giant dome inspired by Hadrian’s Pantheon. If built it would have been big enough to fit St Peter’s Basilica comfortably inside it.

EUR was another WWII plan which had a little more success. Mosillini originally saw a city which stretched from Berlin to Pompeii made entirely out of white marble. He only finished a small suburb in Rome before he was executed for war crimes. That suburb, EUR, is incredible and I highly recommend you go visit the vast white buildings next time you’re in Italy (Hat Tip: Sophie Sockchan).

X Seed 4000 was planned in Japan although it was never going to be built. At 4,000 miles high it would have been the world’s tallest building, although really it’s more of a shell in which an entire city would fit.

Tatlin’s Tower could have been the world’s biggest clock situated in Moscow. The structure which would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower was going to be made of interlooping cylinders. The biggest one would hold conference centers and spin entirely every year, the next biggest would make a full turn each month and so forth.

Chinese ghost cities are an actual thing. With the insane about of production happening in China a bunch of cities have been built in rural areas. Some of them are fully equipped with giant public buildings like art galleries. Unfortunately the people buying these houses are not moving in so there are up to 64 million deserted houses in these abandoned cities.