Kickstarter

Never Built: Los Angeles, an exhibition opening this spring at Los Angeles's A+D Architecture and Design Museum, features a collection of spectacular projects that only saw the drawing board. In words, drawings, models, videos and other media the show looks at visionary works that had the greatest potential to reshape the city. 

The exhibition will include buildings from legends like Frank Lloyd Wright, John Lautner, Rudolph Schindler, Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne, as well as master plans, parks, amusements parks and even transportation proposals like subways, monorails, and aerial transport. All could have transformed both the physical reality and the collective perception of the city. The fascinating stories and mesmerizing images surrounding these projects shed light on a reluctant city whose institutions and infrastructure have often undermined inventive, challenging urban schemes from some of the world's greatest architects, engineers and planners. Never Built sets the stage for a renewed interest in visionary projects in Los Angeles and dares the city to dream again. 

During two years of research we have unearthed countless untold stories and hundreds of beautiful yet buried images. We have completed the exhibition book, published by Metropolis Books, and worked with one of the nation's most celebrated designers—Clive Wilkinson Architects— to conceive of a show worthy of the topic. The entire museum space will become an alternative version of Los Angeles, with an amazing floor map of the city as a guide.

We have finished the research and we have the exhibition design ready. But we need YOUR help to make the show a reality! We are asking specifically for your (tax deductible!) donations to pay for the floor graphic, the cost of building museum-quality models (as well as an 11-foot-tall tower made of over 67,000 Legos), the expense of rights to borrow and mount original drawings, and the price of installing all this, and so much more, into the museum space. Please help us make this amazing show happen. 

-Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin, Curators, Never Built: Los Angeles

Video Photo Credits : Eric Lloyd Wright; Los Angeles World Airports Flight Path Learning Center; Architecture and Design Collection, Art Design & Architecture Museum, UCSB; Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation; Chris Georgesco; Getty Research Institute; Huntington Library; Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority Research Library and Archive; The Walt Disney Company; Hollywood Heritage; Los Angeles City Archives; John Lumsden; City of Santa Monica; Edward Cella Art and Architecture; Steven Holl Architects; Atelier Chistian de Portzamparc; OMA; B+U.