The architectural critics Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell tour nearly 200 of those unrealized building plans. The catalog represents, in one way, “200 years of failed attempts to confer that order, rationality, efficiency, ‘beauty’” dictated by the grid, the authors write. In another way, it “demonstrates just how hard it is, when a designer conceives of something new or outside the orthodoxy, to realize that innovation.” There are always new buildings going up in New York City, but “genuinely pathbreaking concepts often languish,” they write.
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