What would your life be like if you didn’t graduate from school? If you married another girl? If you left home and worked abroad? These are the questions perhaps everyone would have asked themselves at some point in life. What about cities? Have you ever thought that a city, like our lives, could have a completely different look if different paths had been taken?

The book Never Built New York, published by Metropolis and co-written by Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell, could be seen as a “what if” question to the 200-year development of New York. The duo published Never Built Los Angeles in 2013, and this latest publication follows the same setup, in which they gather possible architectural and planning projects of New York, be it crazy, romantic, practical or purely out of a fantasy, and present to us a New York that never existed.

Among the various imaginative proposals, we like architect Raymond Hood’s plan from the 1920s. He suggested building a 10,000-foot-long bridge with skyscrapers functioning as the pillars of the bridge. Not only could they provide accommodation for up to 50,000 people, different businesses and public facilities could also be incorporated. Residents would be able to take the elevators to the bottom of the towers for all sorts of aquatic activities and commuting by the sea. Another favourite is R. Buckminster Fuller’s concept from 1950. He envisioned building a 2km transparent dome over Manhattan to protect the city’s inhabitants from extreme weather conditions.

The above proposals may not have been practical, in fact you could easily call them unrealistic. Still, reading through the case studies in Never Built New York will make you realise that a city, like our lives, can have unlimited potential. What it looks like now is just the result of one concept being chosen over another… The possibilities are endless.