If we view unbuilt architecture as a photograph of the inner turn of the architect, what is revealed in this photograph will demonstrate whether architecture is captured by an ideology of arrogance or an ideology of humility.
The buildability of a design is the fulcrum on which its valuation as unbuilt design often turns. Every buildable unbuilt design sustains the contradiction between ‘pure design’ and the messiness of reality that produces it, which it must navigate and alter, and which may defeat it too.
As imagination recedes in the built environment, unbuilt architecture can be seen not just as creative incompletions but rather as the space for birthing of radical ideas free from the constraints of the built.
In many ways, a project remains unbuilt because most of the time it has challenged the normative, the status quo, the acceptability of 'populist taste'. This is what a reading of history tells us - and why this is important as it inspires future generations of architects to be edgy and provocative.