This website is a home to numerous ideas that couldn’t be realised due to several reasons.
unbuilt 2.0: architecture of future collectives delves deeper into the meaning of unbuilt, and expands beyond the buildable unbuilt. It features about 50 ideas, realistic and speculative, along with thought provoking and intriguing essays on the theme by diverse design professionals across India.
Indian architects report that a significant amount of their work remains unbuilt - whether as concepts that didn’t make the cut at competitions, as proposals which got tied up in red tape, or as projects that were abandoned by stakeholders. While we measure the worth of a building by the visual, tactile and spatial experience it offers, the fact remains that unrealized ideas are just as crucial as built structures - for design, development and discourse. This volume seeks to celebrate these ideas.
In the last twenty years of practice, our firm ABRD Architects has kept busy primarily by competitions – often by winning, but mostly by losing them. Competitions have always fired our imagination – using the opportunity to delve into design charettes. We typically explore divergent options with the intent to question and go beyond the design brief.
The memory is almost visceral in its intensity; the overwhelming, consuming satisfaction of finishing one’s first design assignment – be it a humble cabin or a small amphitheatre nestled against a hypothetical hill – and the realization which hits us as we cap our Rotring pens, that somewhere, someday, this could exist.
Competition Entry, Proposal for the National War Museum, by r+d Studio
Kalpavriksha was Anagram Architects’ entry in a collaborative competition for an architectural symbol for India in Steel.
Research Institute of Natural History, Sewri Mudflats, Mumbai, by Aditi Vyas, proposes to re-align human activities to benefit the natural environment.
Design Plus Architects’ Competition Entry- Diu Educational Hub, proposes to continue the lineage of Diu with an ecologically and culturally sustainable proposal.
Proposed by RC Architects, the winning entry for Dhun- Centre for Imagination is imagined as one large pavilion providing an opportunity to explore ideas through live demonstrations, public interactions and art exhibitions/shows.
![Aanganwadi, Calicut, by [ar&de]](https://unbuiltideas.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/03.jpg)
[ar&de] proposed the aanganwadi’s design as an educational space that could also cater to women and other members of the community.
Receive updates on inspiring unbuilt ideas and access to intriguing articles on Unbuilt Ideas.