Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Greatest Buildings Never Built

Episode Date: November 21, 2022

The world has many amazing buildings. From the 2,000-year-old Pantheon in Rome to the gleaming new Burj Khalifa in Dubi, humanity has been reflected in its buildings.  However, some of the greatest architectural concepts were buildings that were never built. Whether it was due to a lack of money, having ideas ahead of the technology to build it, or pure insanity, many of the greatest ideas for buildings were never constructed.  Learn more about the greatest buildings that were never built and why they never saw the light of day on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Darcy Adams Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/EverythingEverywhere Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The world has many amazing buildings, from the 2,000-year-old pantheon in Rome to the gleaming new Birch-Khalifa in Dubai. Humanity is often reflected in its buildings. However, some of the greatest architectural concepts were buildings that were never built. Whether it was due to a lack of money, having ideas before the technology to build it was available, or just pure insanity, many of the greatest ideas for buildings were never constructed. Learn more about the greatest buildings that were never built, and why they never saw the light of day. On this episode, of everything everywhere daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The genesis of this episode came about from researching several notable architects.

Having created some of the world's greatest structures, their greatest ideas were ones that were put to paper but could never be built. There are a host of reasons why great ideas for buildings never see completion. The most common reason is lack of funding. For example, construction has already started on the Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia, which, if completed, would be the tallest building in the world at one kilometer tall. However, finances and contract issues caused construction to stop in 2018 when it was only a third completed. One of the first buildings that was never created that I wanted to touch on was one called the cenotaph of Newton. A cenotaph is just a monument to someone who died. That's not their tomb. The cenotaph of Newton was a proposed structure that was to honor Isaac Newton. It was designed

by the 18th century French architect Etienne Louis Boulet. Newton, who died in 1726, had become an icon of the Enlightenment by the late 18th century. To honor Newton, Boulet proposed the construction of a structure that would have been one of the greatest buildings on Earth. It would have been a gigantic sphere that would have been a 150 meters or 500 feet tall. The sphere would have sat in a three-tiered cylinder base as a marble would be placed in a holder. Inside the sphere, the only object was to have been a sarcophagus for Newton, although it isn't sure if his body would have actually been moved. The small sarcophagus would have been overwhelmed by the size of the interior of the sphere.

The inside was to invert daylight from the outside. During the day, it would be dark, and at night it would be light. The light would come from a single light suspended from the top, located in the center of the sphere. It's unknown how the light would function, as it was decades before the development of electric light. But if it had been built, it would have been the largest building in the world at the time. It would have been larger than the Great Pyramid and taller than any cathedral in Europe. Drawings and etching of Boulé's idea circulated widely, and it was both praised and derided. Nothing like this had ever been built or even conceived before. The design looks like an arque-deco structure from the 1920s or 1930s. It was probably beyond

18th century technology to build something this big, but it would certainly be possible today. Of all the buildings mentioned in this episode, this is the one I would love to see built almost 250 years after it was designed. Another massive building that was never built, and it's a good thing that it was never built, was the Voxhalla, the Great Hall of the People that was designed by Adolf Hitler's chief architect, Albert Speer. Hiller had massive plans for what he wanted to do with Berlin after the war. He was going to rebuild Berlin as the new capital of the Reich and rename it Germania. The focal point of the new city would be a gigantic dome known as the Voxhalla.

It would have looked like the U.S. Capitol building on steroids. In comparison, the U.S. Capitol is 289 feet. tall as measured to the top of the Statue of Freedom at the top of the dome. The Vauxhalla would have been 290 meters or 950 feet tall. St. Peter's Basilica and the Capitol Building could both fit inside it. It was designed to hold 180,000 people. The dome would have been so large that weather formations would have formed inside of it. It's been depicted on screen an alternative history television show such as The Man in the High

Castle from Amazon and HBO's fatherland. The Voxhalla is sought to have been the equivalent of a cathedral for the new Nazi religion that Hitler wanted to be the center of. The Voxhalla wasn't built because Germany lost the war. However, it was far from the largest dome ever proposed. That distinction might belong to Buckminster Fuller. Fuller popularized the geodesic dome. A geodesic dome is a dome constructed out of regular triangles. They are extremely thin and strong, but Fuller took the idea to an extreme. In 1960, he proposed a very audacious plan to put a two-mile-wide dome over Midtown Manhattan. The dome would be made out of shatterproof glass that was coated with aluminum to reduce glare. The entire dome would have covered everything, including all of the skyscrapers in Midtown,

including the Empire State Building. The estimated weight of the entire dome was only 4,000 tons, which would have actually weighed less than the air underneath it. There were concerns that if it were built, it would float away and would need to be anchored to the ground. All combustion engines would have been banned under the dome because all the fumes would have been trapped. Similarly, it's believed that heating wouldn't have been necessary because all of the heat would be trapped below the dome. Needless to say, it never came anywhere near being constructed. Another incredible structure was designed by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1956, at the age of 88, he designed his most ambitious building ever. It was dubbed

the Illinois. The Illinois would have been built in Chicago, and would have been the tallest building in the world by a very, very wide margin. It was planned to have been one mile high or 1.6 kilometers. It would have had 528 stories, 18,460,000 square feet, or 1.7 million square meters of floor space. It would have been twice as tall as the Birch Khalifa, the tallest building in the world today. Wright actually thought that the building was feasible in the 1950s, given the technology at the time. However, analysis of his plans decades later showed that there were factors that he never considered. Most importantly, the high winds that the building would encounter at such extreme heights.

He also had issues with the elevators and how they would have worked. He envisioned atomic-powered elevators, whatever that meant, that wouldn't use cables. Architects later had to deal with all of these problems when they started building extreme skyscrapers. The Nazis weren't the only totalitarian government that wanted to build enormous edifices to their greatness. The Soviet Union had actually started construction on a building that was known as the Palace of the Soviets. The Palace of the Soviets was to be built on the bank of the Muscova River, at the location where the Cathedral of Christ the Savior once stood. The cathedral was originally built in celebration of the retreat of Napoleon from Moscow in 1812. but it was demolished under the orders of Joseph Stalin in 1931.

There were a series of architectural competitions for the creation of a building that would be built on the site. The building was to be the home of the Supreme Soviet, and the focal point of the new country, taking parades and other events away from the Kremlin. The contest was won by Boris Iofan. His design was supposed to be the pinnacle of monumental Stalinist architecture. The design had a grand hall that could seat 21,000 people where the major Congresses would all take place. Directly above the hall would be an office building supported by a steel framework that surrounded the Great Hall. And on top of everything would be an enormous statue of Lenin.

The entire height of the building was to be 416 meters or 1,365 feet, which would make it taller than the Empire State Building, the tallest building in the world at that time. Excavation at the construction site began in 1935, and by 1941, part of the skeleton of the building had been constructed with photos of the progress published in Soviet newspapers. When Germany invaded, construction was put on hold indefinitely. Construction workers were conscripted, and most of the steel earmarked for construction was diverted for the war effort. In 1942, these steel beams were all dismantled for rail bridges, and with so many men pressed into the war, they had no construction staff to maintain the wall which kept the river water out of the foundation. After the war, there were

several proposals to build a scaled-down version of the palace of the Soviets, but they never amounted to anything because Stalin had lost interest. Of all the buildings I'll mention in this episode, the Palace of the Soviets came the closest to actually being constructed. The Palace of the Soviets wasn't the only over-the-top Soviet structure that was proposed. Another crazy structure was known as Tatlin's Tower. Tatelan's Tower was the brainchild of the Russian artist and architect Vladimir Tatlan. He designed a tower as a monument to the Third Communist International, which was founded in 1919. His tower was a monstrous steel structure, which in composition would have been similar to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. His plan was to build it in St. Petersburg. However, in terms of design,

it would have looked nothing like the Eiffel Tower. His design looked more like a roller coaster with a double metal helix going around it. The proposed structure would have been 400 meters, or 1,300 feet tall, much taller than the Eiffel Tower. The real kicker is that parts of the structure would have actually rotated on a schedule anywhere between a year and a day, depending on what part of the structure was rotating. There was a lot of interest in the structure, but the Soviet Union in 1920 was in no position to supply that much iron and steel for a project like this.

There is actually a model of the structure in the courtyard of the Royal Academy in London today. There have been many proposed buildings that were never built. There have probably been more buildings that have been proposed than have actually been constructed. However, there was one proposed building that was, absolutely bonkers. It was to have been an observation tower built for the 1937 World's Fair in Paris called the Fair Dumand, or the lighthouse of the world. The architect who proposed it was Eugene Fresené. The tower was to be 701 meters or 2300 feet tall, with a spotlight and restaurant at the top. So this was yet another plan for the world's tallest structure, something

that many architects attempt. However, there was something about this tower that was different from every other proposed tower that I've ever read about. On the exterior of the tower, there would be a ramp that spiraled up around it. And the ramp was designed for cars to drive to the top, where they would be parking space for 500 vehicles. Now, I don't know if you've ever driven on a road that had a cliff on one side, or even driven over a very high bridge, but the idea of driving around a tower with a constant tight curve, over a thousand feet high, is terrifying. It was designed to show how important the automobile had become, which I guess it would have, but needless to say, the tower was never built.

Many ideas are floated by architects and designers with no intention of them ever being constructed. Some of them are just thought experiments, and others are an attempt at gaining attention. Nonetheless, it's fun to think about what the world would be like if some of those incredible structures had actually been built. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener, Senior Drul Cup over at Apple Podcasts in the United States.

They write, My New Favorite Podcast. Gary Aaron's History Podcast is a must listen. The new king of 15-minute deep dives on a daily subject. The writing and research are superb, and Gary is just plain pleasant to listen to every day. When he touches on areas of obscure history that I know well, I'm always waiting to see if I can find a small air to crow about,

and that's a very rare event. always acknowledged by Gary with humility and appreciation. Topics include something for every taste, and Gary Art has the rare talent of making you genuinely interested in a topic you never would have thought would appeal to you. Best of all, I've been listening to Gary every day for almost two years, and I have no idea who he voted for or what his political views could be. He deserves five stars just for that.

Grazieusse, Signor Drull Cup. You have figured out my secret. I feel no need to insert politics into everything, as there is enough of that in the world today. I figure if I can help people learn about the world they live in, I trust that they'll be able to figure out the rest on their own. Remember, if you leave a review or send a boostagram, you two can have it read in the show.

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