

Designed between 1908 and 1911, Antoni Gaudí’s unbuilt Attraction Hotel was a proposed 360-meter parabolic skyscraper for Manhattan featuring catenary arches and five continental halls. Revealed through technical drawings in 1960, the visionary design highlights Gaudí’s early foresight into modern skyscraper engineering.

Designed by Studio Mryn for the Beyond the Classroom competition, Mud, Module, and Memory: A School That Grows is an adaptable educational framework in Ahmedabad, India. Crafted from earth blocks, stone, bamboo, and reclaimed wood, the school employs modularity, passive climate strategies, and tactile landscape play to create an evolving learning environment where the ground itself becomes a teacher.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s The Illinois was an ambitious vision for a mile-high skyscraper in Chicago, combining an unconventional structural system with his ideas about how cities could grow vertically. This project was intended to be a fully autonomous vertical city, integrating infrastructure, housing, workspaces, and transportation into a single structure.

Rural housing succeeds when it builds upon local wisdom rather than imposing top-down solutions. The Tetris framework provides an adaptable code that empowers villagers to construct homes using their own materials, skills, and cash flow.

Emerging from Japan’s post-war avant-garde movement, Arata Isozaki’s City in the Air bypassed Tokyo’s congested streets to propose a vertical metropolis. By suspending modular capsules high above the ground, the unbuilt 1962 master plan imagined an architecture that could grow and transform like a living organism.

Set in the late 1970s, Steven Holl’s Bridge of Houses explores the building-bridge typology to transform urban transit corridors into collective living spaces. Across speculative proposals for Melbourne and New York, the project reinterprets historic precedents like the Ponte Vecchio by integrating affordable housing directly over active and obsolete rail infrastructure to reconnect severed city grids.

Designed between 1908 and 1911, Antoni Gaudí’s unbuilt Attraction Hotel was a proposed 360-meter parabolic skyscraper for Manhattan featuring catenary arches and five continental halls. Revealed through technical drawings in 1960, the visionary design highlights Gaudí’s early foresight into modern skyscraper engineering.
The book features 54 inspiring yet unbuilt architecture ideas by Indian architects, and nine intriguing essays on the theme contributed by professionals and academicians. The first ever book to celebrate the value of unbuilt Indian architecture.












Rupali Gupte is an architect and urbanist based in Mumbai, Professor at the School of Environment and Architecture (SEA) and a partner at BARDStudio. Her work often crosses disciplinary boundaries and takes different forms – writings, drawings, mixed-media works, story telling, teaching, curation, walks and spatial interventions.
Her works include extensive research on contemporary Indian urbanism with a focus on architecture and built environment; tactical practices; housing; and urban form. In 2013, she co-founded the School of Environment and Architecture (sea.edu.in). SEA is envisaged as an experimental academic space for research and education in architecture and urbanism. She has a wide range of publications, has delivered lectures and been on juries across the world. Her works in collaboration with her partner Prasad Shetty, have been shown in several exhibitions including the 56th Venice Biennale, X Sao Paolo Architecture Biennale, Seoul Biennale of Art and Architecture, at Manifesta 7 in Bolzano, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona and at galleries such as Project 88, Devi Art Foundation and the Mumbai Art Room. She has recently curated an exhibition involving artists and architects titled ‘When is Space? Conversations in Contemporary Architecture’ at the Jawahar Kala Kendra.