The coffins pile up one above the other in the cemeteries. Gravediggers dig out half-decayed corpses regularly to make way for freshness. The old coffins are disassembled and sold to the poor as firewood. Forgotten bones are scattered on the floor, a sweet-and-rotten smell is in the air.
As far as the macabre burial reality in London in the early 19th century. In no other city was so much died then as in the capital of the British Empire - the first million metropolis in the world. In the course of industrialization, the population jumped to two million by 1835, around 1900 lived in London 6.7 million. The cremation was out of the question for most - a solution was needed for the city's deadly problem.
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Architektur-Luftschlösser: Higher, great, but nothingThe most radical is Thomas Willson's: in 1829, the architect presented his vision of a gigantic pyramid that could accommodate up to five million bodies. According to Willson, the 500-meter obelisk and observatory-crowned monster should be on Primerose Hill, one of London's most beautiful vantage points. Rent per burial chamber: 50 pounds.
Paradise under the dome
As a "practical, cheap and lucrative" Willson advertised his invention and promised the investors of the "Pyramid General Cemetery Company" a dream return of five percent annually. Alone: Parliament was not convinced of Willson's "Metropolitan Sepulcher." In 1832, it passed a law that cleared the way for park cemeteries in the London area.
Willson was ridiculed by his contemporaries as a nutmeg - though it takes exactly such lateral thinkers to find answers to urgent questions and advance the architecture. Creative visionaries like El Lissitzky, who wanted to put life into the air: In 1924, the Russian avant-gardist introduced his floating skyscrapers, the so-called cloud bars.
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Life in the trans-frontier skyscraper: "Wolkenbügel" of the Russian avant-garde El Lissitzky (1924)
Or universal genius Richard Buckminster Fuller, who wanted to pack Manhattan's city center under a gigantic glass dome in 1968 to reduce energy consumption and protect the city from heat, cold and dust. Never shed any more snow, fantasized "Bucky" and wanted to "turn Midtown Manhattan into a paradise," he wrote.
Rem Kohlhaas, in turn, conceived the "Bangkok Hyperbuilding" in 1996, a 1000 meter high monster in which 120,000 people were to live. "The past is too small to live in," the Dutch architect proclaimed, but did not prevail with it, as did Bucky with his "Manhattan Dome" or Lissitzky's "Wolkenbügeln".
Their ideas belong to the canon of wonderful architectural castles, gathered in the now published in German "Atlas of buildings never built" (dtv). Author Philip Wilkinson tells the story of 50 near-misses that have failed for a variety of reasons.
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120,000-Man-Monstrum: The Bangkok Hyperbuilding by Rem Koolhaas (1996)
Sometimes the construction company went bankrupt - as in the case of the London Eiffel Tower begun in 1892, whimsy of the eccentric railway manager Sir Edward Watkin. Once another design won the ideas competition. Thus, the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe could not prevail in 1921 with his magnificent glass high-rise on the Spreedreieck in Berlin - instead, since 2009, an office building emblazoned there, which looks like, "as if the floor plan two reciprocal wedged Currywursts modeled," said the "Frankfurter General newspaper".
Other architectural icons never got beyond the drawing board stage, because they were simply not feasible with the resources at that time. Buildings like the Monument of the III. International, for example: a diagonally rising spiral colossus made of steel with rotating glass elements, in which the individual organs of the Communist International were to gather.
At 400 meters, the monument would have been much higher than the tallest building in Europe, the Eiffel Tower. At the top, a radio station was supposed to be enthroned in a hemisphere that turned every hour around itself.
To be carved in stone megalomania
Devised in 1919 by the Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin, the monument became a symbol of revolution that could be seen from afar. Comrades carried a bulky model of the tower through the streets during May Day demonstrations.
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Great Revolution, unwieldy monument: Model of the Tatlin Tower (1925)
The revolutionary monument could not be realized - nor was the unification of the proletarians of all countries. It remained a head-birth, comparable in its bombastic proportions with Boris Iofan's "Palace of the Soviets" for dictator Josef Stalin or the Nazi vision of a "world capital Germania": megalomania in the middle of Berlin to be carved in stone.
Terrifying blocks - but not nearly as exciting as those fantasy shapes that took real fears into account. The one about a nuclear strike. At the height of the Cold War, British "Archigram" visionary Ron Herron introduced his "Walking City" model in 1964: a 50-story submarine egg that could move anywhere on giant spider legs where it was needed becomes.
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Philip Wilkinson:
Atlas of buildings never built
A story of great visions
dtv publishing company; 256 pages; 30,00 Euro.
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Away from areas that have been devastated by nuclear bombardment or environmental destruction - towards safe regions where the economy is booming. The migrant city could be used for the global nomads but also as a refugee camp during wars and crises; She could crawl away from rockets in an instant, if need be, to the moon.
A science-fiction bauble, fueled by fear of the future, such as technology euphoria, which still inspires architects to this day. Because she poses groundbreaking questions, author Wilkinson says: must the city of the future necessarily be stationary, insisting on right angles, towering high?
Or is it allowed to sleep on the seabed, as needed? When the lateral thinkers of the British architectural group "Archigram" presented their idea of an "underwater city" 50 years ago, nobody believed in its feasibility. Today, a modern Atlantis seems within reach. At least if it goes to the Japanese construction company Shimizu.
"Ocean Spiral" is the name of their vision of an underwater settlement where up to 5000 people live, work and have fun in an acrylic glass capsule. Estimated construction costs: 23 billion euros. "The ocean offers endless possibilities," Shimizu said in 2014 at the presentation. Or, as Captain Nemo put it in Jules Verne's sci-fi novel "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", "I see hope for later times, when humanity is ripe, for a new, better life."
From the walkable elephant to the Acropolis Palace to the Endless Tower: Click through to see the most beautiful architectural castles in history!