5 Massive buildings that were never built

[Music] throughout history mankind has managed to create some pretty amazing buildings ranging from the Pyramids of Egypt to the Burj Kalifa but making a building has always so to speak been easier drawn than done and so it's only natural that some of the most jaw-dropping massive buildings ever conceived have remained confined to paper in this video I'll be showing five examples of that the first one came about as a product of the Enlightenment it was designed by the French architects Etienne lui Budhia and was intended to be a funeral monument for the famous scientist Isaac Newton 50 years after his death Newton had become a prominent symbol of the movement of reason and rationality sweeping across Europe and was widely admired presumably also by bullying himself because he certainly didn't hold back with the design the building known as the Cenotaph for Isaac Newton would be at the height of 150 meters or 500 feet with the tallest building in the world dwarf in the previous holder of the title the strasbourg cathedral and even out sizing the Great Pyramid at Giza the sheer volume of the building makes the tightly planted cypress trees associated with mourning by the Greeks and Romans look more like gross than anything else and the humans climbing this man-made mountain appear ant-like in contrast to it having entered the giant sphere through a long tunnel you would have been met by an inverted world during daytime light would have penetrated the upper parts of the dome through a number of painstakingly positioned holes so as to create an accurate representation of the stars in the night sky when on the other hand it was dark outside the interior of the building would have been lit by some sort of son likes fear hanging in the middle of the space the only thing giving a sense of human scale in the room would have been Newton's sarcophagus located so to speak at the center of gravity but the Cenotaph was never built for obvious reasons it was simply too big the cost of such a product would have quite fittingly been astronomical and it would have been impractical from an engineering standpoint this would probably not have been much of a problem for booyeah though who saw architecture more snow to envisioning conceptual ideas through spatial forms rather than a science of building and his drawings of similarly impressive projects actually became a widely circulated and gave him a fair bit of Fame the next project takes us to the other side of the Atlantic under the first years of the 20th century at the time the construction of skyscrapers was rapidly changing the face of New York City into something that we would recognize today but while most of the skyscrapers were still being built in classical styles there was one which had been built will stuck out as incredibly futuristic for its time it was known as the hotel attraction and assigned by no one less than Antoni gaudí this would have been New York's own Sagrada família very little is known about the projects but supposedly to unknown businessman fascinated by the works of Gaudi travelled to Spain and managed to convince him to design a grand New York hotel for them the building was to be a downtown Playhouse for the rich with lavish guestrooms six floors of restaurants a large theater and lecture hall multiple galleries as well as a 390 foot tall exhibition space at the top of the hotel there would have been a star-shaped sphere in which up to 30 people at the time could have gained unobstructed views of the city while this would have been the tallest building in the world at the height of over 1100 feet or about 360 meters it would have been the tallest in the United States but in the end gaudy accounts of the projects and there are two stories about why one states that I fell ill in 1909 and simply couldn't work on it and more while another one claims that Gaudi being a communist decided that it would be wrong to participate in building a palace for the wealthy following this the project was quickly forgotten and would actually remain more or less unknown until the 1950s it was never decided exactly where the building would have been located but one possible site was that of the later World Trade Center and that's why following 9/11 a group of Spanish architects actually proposed building out his hotel in its place another great tower that was never built was the fire diamond or Lighthouse of the world designed by Ian Faison a for the 1937 Paris Exhibition the 701 meter or about 2,300 feet tall concrete structure would have been topped by a restaurant and as the name suggests there would also be a light beacon but what really makes this tower stand out is the way by which you get to the top because winding around the building would have been a spiral ramp on which you're actually supposed to drive by car until reaching the garage at the height of 500 meters by then you would have been driving for about half an hour [Music] meanwhile over in Germany the Nazis have come to power and Hitler along with his chief architect Albert Speer were planning the construction of the new world capital gate ammonia although it was in fact never officially called that instead of the project went by the name of the comprehensive construction plan for the capital but regardless of its name the plan was to reorganize Berlin along a five kilometer long Boulevard known as the park dhaniya and to build a series of huge monuments so that Berlin would as Hitler said be only comparable with ancient Egypt Babylon and Rome the most impressive building in this new Berlin would have been the fox hunt early sketches of the building had actually been made by Hitler himself all the way back in 1925 and the design stems from his admiration of the Pantheon in Rome in the later versions of the building made by Speer the foxholley would have been 290 meters or 950 feet tall and made out of combination of steel and lightweight concrete hidden behind stone cladding the oculus or roof light located at the center of the dome would with a diameter of 46 meters or 150 feet being so large that the entire dome of st. Peter's Cathedral could have been lowered through it the interior of the building on the other hand would have been so huge that when filled his limit with people the condensation from their breaths could have caused clouds to form within it and subsequently even rain so what was the purpose of this monster of a building well of course it will have impressed and humbled and I want to saw it but the design of the building was not the only thing that Hitler and Speer borrowed from the Romans much like the Emperor's of antiquity Hitler wanted to make a temple intended for the public worship of him and his successors as Speer would later go on to acknowledge in an interview Hitler believed that a centuries past his huge domed Assembly Hall would require great holy significance and become a hallowed shrine as important to national socialism as st. Peter's in Rome is to Roman Catholicism such cultism was at the root of the entire plan as you probably guessed though the war made sure to put an end to this project before it could even begin the last building brings us back to the United States and to yet another skyscraper known variously as the Illinois Illinois sky city or the mine hi Illinois this is by far the tallest building on this list the project which was unveiled in 1957 and designed by Frank Lloyd Wright was intended to be built somewhere in Chicago as the name suggests the mile-high Illinois was to be over one mine or 1600 meters tall and would have had 528 stories in order to put that into perspective that would have made it more than four times the height of the tallest building at the time the Empire State Building and twice as tall as the current holder of that title the Burj Kalifa this vast tower would have housed a hundred thousand people and had parking space for 15,000 cars as well as 100 helicopters it would have also contained all government offices in the city of Chicago but in building such an incredibly tall skyscraper one would inevitably be bumping some problems for example the higher floors of the building would be inclined to sweep at a lot in the wind causing discomfort for its occupants right acknowledge this and among other things is rested that it will be solved by placing a tuned mass damper somewhere in the building although this was a more or less untrained concept at the time he also proposed cutting the travel time from floor to floor by using atomic powered elevators which would have allowed them to move at 60 miles per hour but would probably raise some eyebrows if used today finally there was the rather important question of whether or not the building would be able to stand at all perhaps a particularly strong wind would have told tumbling down that would not be a problem according to rights as he had made sure to bury the base of the building 150 feet or 45 meters into the ground as well as make it successively narrower the further up it got even so it's still up to debate whether the Illinois could have been built another question surrounding the project might be why Frank Lloyd Wright who supposedly detested cities and centralization suddenly decided to take that to its extreme after all he'd always been for the suburban Edo and believed that with cars and telephones readily available there was no longer any reason to live in crowded cities but perhaps this isn't as out of character as the night seemed at first after all building super tall skyscrapers would free up a lot of space and subsequently allow cities to become less dense as he reportedly later said if we're going to have centralization war not quit fooling around and inhabit another part of the answer it could be that he was seeking attention at the time architectural historians were begin to see the 89 year-old right as a husband the new wave of architects was personified by the likes of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe whose box-like buildings right happened to load so perhaps this was a way of saying I'm still here if so it certainly worked at least in the beginning journalists quickly flock to Wright's Taliesin compound in Wisconsin hear all about his new super tall skyscraper about as you know it was never built this was not mainly because of the question of whether it could but rather because of a lack of funding the final note of the project was the death of Frank Lloyd Wright's two years later at the age of 91 you

Channel: Kings and Things

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Keywords: architecture, classical architecture, modern architecture, modern art, skyscraper, roman empire, third reich, hitler, nazi, nazi germany, enlightenment, enlightenment era, albert speer, megaprojects, history, buildings that were never built, buildings that were never made, national socialism, germania, welthauptstadt germania, world capital germania, the illinois, gaudi, antoni gaudi, new york, chicago, paris, paris exhibition, monument, futurism, futuristic, phare du monde

Id: 9yO5nJNDx-Q

Length: 10min 41sec (641 seconds)

Published: Fri May 18 2018