#HTE

An Exhibition of Crazy, Never-Built NYC Architectural Concepts

You might know that in the 1940s there were plans to build an airport right over Manhattan.

But did you know that Buckminster Fuller wanted to build a climate-controlled dome over midtown in the 1960s?

Or that in the 1880s, a pneumatic overhead railway was proposed for commuters?

Or that I.M. Pei was commissioned to design a 1,500-foot skyscraper over Grand Central Station in the 1950s?

These concepts and more are the subject of Never Built New York, an exhibition being developed at the Queens Museum. That’s the location of the famous Panorama of the City of New York, a 10,000-square-foot scale model of New York City circa 1964.

The cool thing is, the exhibition is currently having students in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation actually build models of some of these concepts, and they’ll then install them within the Panorama itself!

In order to raise funds to complete the exhibition, the Queens Museum is holding a Kickstarter campaign:

There’s just 30 days left to pledge, and they definitely need your help: At press time they were at $8,718 of a $35,000 goal. If the exhibition is funded, it will open in September of this year.