Forty years ago, Architectural Record asked me to review the granddaddy of all “what if?” books on the building art, Alison Sky and Michelle Stone’s Unbuilt America: Forgotten Architecture in the United States from Thomas Jefferson to the Space Age (1976), which I hailed as “one of the most thought-provoking architecture books in recent years.”

Unbuilt America appeared just as orthodox modernism was giving way to postmodernism, and it perfectly complemented the more expansive view of architectural history then emerging (which also paralleled the growing inclusiveness in our society at large from the 1960s onward). The book’s rare appeal to a general readership owed much to a widespread fascination with “what might have been,” and it inspired a host of similar volumes, including the recently published Never Built New York by Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell, co-authors of Never Built Los Angeles (which accompanied an eponymous exhibition held at LA’s Architecture and Design Museum in 2013.)

Though Never Built New York contains some well-known proposals that never made it past the design stage—among them Frank Lloyd Wright’s St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie Residence Towers (1927) and R. Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao’s Dome Over Manhattan (1960)—much else will be revelatory even to specialists. For example, I’d never known about Cass Gilbert’s 1931 attempt to conceal the steel latticework towers of Othmar Ammann’s George Washington Bridge beneath a stripped classical slipcover of pink granite. Likewise I’d been unaware of Philip Johnson’s monster quartet of Brutalist apartment slabs for Chelsea (1967), not far from where the High Line has lately become a magnet for high-style condo architecture.

Echoing Unbuilt America’s original mix, the new survey encompasses ideas that were fortunately rejected (Santiago Calatrava’s eerily skeletal 1992 proposal for completing the Cathedral of St. John the Divine) and regrettably thwarted (Joseph Urban’s boffo 1927 Broadway theater for the experimental impresario Max Reinhardt, which would have been as much of a spectacle as anything on its stage). Many were thoroughly impractical (John A. Harris’s demented 1924 call for draining the East River to create more land, and Norman Sher’s equally crazy 1934 plan to dam the Hudson River and join Manhattan’s West Side with New Jersey), while others were ingeniously inventive (I.M. Pei’s Helix of 1957, a cylindrical tower with pie-shaped apartments that could be expanded or contracted as residents’ need for space changed.)

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What sets Never Built New York apart from its predecessors are the numerous schemes depicted through computer-generated imagery, which can now attain such verisimilitude that it’s hard to tell if you’re looking at a completed project or a mere predictive apparition. This blurring of reality can be of immense commercial benefit (no need to tell that to Trump), and it is widely assumed that the more lifelike an illustration, the more a client will believe that what it shows can be realized.

However, Never Built New York repeatedly demonstrates that the psychological charge conveyed by a powerful drawing outstrips even the most realistic digital simulacrum. The celebrated architectural draftsman Hugh Ferriss, who flourished in the Twenties and Thirties, is represented by his charcoal sketches of boldly imaginative cityscapes, which seem plausible because of their appeal to the period’s deep belief in progress as the basis for modern civilization.