Spanish architect David Romero recently released a series of digital visualisations of unbuilt architectural projects by one of the 20th century’s most eminent American architects, Frank Lloyd Wright. His fascinating 3D renderings underscore the potential of this technology and tell us a great deal about the breadth and ambition of Wright’s vision more than six decades after his death.
As a researcher, I am captivated by unbuilt architecture, having worked alongside the site of Sir Edwin Lutyens’ largely unbuilt Metropolitan Cathedral design in Liverpool for many years. To unpack this topic, we first need to understand why unbuilt architecture “exists” at all.
Given the sheer size of buildings, architects rely on scaled drawings and models to develop ideas. These can either be hand-produced on paper, or via computer software where designs are usually drawn at a 1:1 scale and viewed on a digital screen as a scaled-down version.
