Making Never Built New York

This exhibition documents the Columbia GSAPP Fabrication Lab’s recent partnership with the Queens Museum on the exhibition Never Built New York. Co-curated by Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin, and designed by Christian Wassman, Never Built New York presents “the ghost of a city that could have been.” Spanning two centuries, the exhibition features nearly 200 visionary proposals for New York City that include bridges, skyscrapers, master plans, parks, airports, and extensions of the city. Bringing together original prints, drawings, models, installations and animations, Never Built New York constructs a parallel metropolis that reveals the city’s goals and challenges—past, present and future.

During the summer of 2017 the GSAPP Fabrication Lab worked closely with the show’s curators and Queens Museum staff to realize an ambitious installation for the exhibition: an intervention in the museum’s iconic panoramic model of New York City. Using drawings and images culled from Avery Library and Drawings & Archives, a team of GSAPP students constructed digital models of projects featured in Never Built New York, which were then 3D-printed at the GSAPP Fabrication Lab. These physical models have been placed in the Queens Museum’s panoramic model of New York at each project’s intended site, offering an extraordinary bird’s-eye view of the “city that could have been.”