Unrealized Moscow
For most of my adolescence, I planned to make architecture my profession. I drew plans and sketches of buildings, read books on the subject, took four years of drafting classes in high school, the whole thing. Why it was that I then went to college and majored in physics I don't really know; I can't really say that I regret being a physicist, but I still feel an urge to design buildings and other useful spaces for people; I am, therefore, frequently frustrated at having no good outlet for these design urges.
I can remember, in some vague way, seeing collections of architectural renderings for fantastic projects that were never built: giant buildings — whole floating towns even — that probably could not be built, buildings of the future, and quite a number of memorials and monuments of one type or another. The latter, which for the most part were otherwise useless structures, often exhibited the most fanciful forms, looking more often than not like some Claus Oldenberg sculpture gone bad. I remember seeing one for some giant Soviet Monument to the Nationale or the Worker or some such, fashioned as a giant spiral of enormous height. I'm sure I saw it in films of the same vintage as documentaries of Dada. The monument concept, of course, retained it purity and was never built.
This is one beguiling path of nostalgia that I always find inviting, so I enjoyed it when I tripped, someplace, over this link to a website documenting
The Architecture of Moscow from the 1930s to the early 1950s. Unrealised projects.
(Click on the grey arrows.)
Precisely! Heroic, monumental architectural renderings of heroic, monumental structures that were too great ever to be built! Sometimes I think I feel artistic and idealistic enough — and now old and crazy enough — to devote myself to creating outlandish renderings of buildings that will never be realized, only dreamt.