Buckminster Fuller created this striking 1960 overlay photograph “Dome Over Manhattan” in 1960. It’s one of many prints, drawings, models, and artworks in the “Never Built New York” exhibition now on view at the Queens Museum. Co-curated by Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin, and designed by Christian Wassmann, the exhibition “explores a city where you could catch a football game in Manhattan, travel via a floating airport, and live in an apartment also acting as a bridge support.” Below, Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Key Plan for Ellis Island” (1959), Eliot Noyes’s Westinghouse Pavilion proposal for the 1964 World’s Fair installed at the exhibit as a scaled-down “bouncy house” model, and Paul Rudolph’s “Galaxon Pavilion,” designed for the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows and recreated in virtual reality by Shimahara Illustration. The exhibition is based on the curator’s book, Never Built New York. From an interview with Lubell and Golding in City Lab:
Lubell: The way you experience the show in Queens connects you to the site, makes it real, and then you’re in the salon space before finally walking up to the panorama, looking above the projects with a sense of how it all would have affected the city. The combination of galleries makes for a really powerful experience.
Seeing these projects through our show doesn’t just create a ‘wow’ factor: it can inspire people to learn more about how cities do or don’t work. It clues people into the planning process. I think the emotions that come from looking back at these projects will make people think about what we can do now and in the future to improve New York.
(Thanks, Matt Kelly!)