LAX Original Master Plan (Photo courtesy of Los Angeles World Airports Flight Path Learning Center)

For residents of Los Angeles — long considered a playground for creative visionaries and experimental artists — dreaming about “what could have been” has been a favored, if painful, mental exercise. Some of the most groundbreaking projects proposed over the past 110 years have failed to see fruition, until now.

More than 50 of these extinguished plans, which never made it past the blueprint phase, have a new home at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum’s Never Built: Los Angeles exhibit, set to open this spring.

“The minute you walk in, you experience L.A. in a totally new way,” says Never Built curator Sam Lubell. “It’s stunningly gorgeous stuff. It really takes your breath away.”

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A floor map of the reimagined city will serve as a guide for the exhibit. At the entrance will stand a replica of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art dome, which came close to being built in 2001. The museum’s columns will be transformed into two never-before-seen skyscrapers (Frank Lloyd Wright's 50-story Catholic Cathedral and the spiraling 1,290 foot Tower of Civilization) with a monorail whirring past.

Part history, part “Tomorrow Land,” the vision for the exhibit came about two years ago when the Getty Institute donated models of defunct projects it had little use for. Lubell and his team saw the models as something else — projects of extraordinary hope and potential that could have transformed the city’s culture had they not been rejected.

“The level of talent [in L.A.] is one of the highest in the world. It’s where people came to do their own thing in their own way,” says Lubell. “But then [their ideas] bounce against the wall that is Los Angeles, which shoots them down.”

As to why these projects failed, Lubell credits a combination of “politics, money, and a lack of risk-taking in city officials.” The curators hope the exhibit will prevent current and future projects from meeting the same fate as the Never Built projects.

“This issue of ambitious projects being put in limbo and out to pasture is still continuing,” says Lubell. “We’re trying to change the culture, trying to get that to slow down.”

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Some of the current projects Lubell worries about most include the L.A. River Master Plan, which will transform the concrete canal into a parkway, and the Frank Gehry design for Grand Avenue, intended to bring life to the dismal downtown artery.

There are some recent projects that have made it past L.A.’s gatekeepers. Lubell mentions The Broad, a new art museum that will open across from the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown L.A. next year, further invigorating L.A.’s art scene. Another project is the plan for Emerson College’s West Coast campus in Hollywood, which Lubell calls a “very dramatic design.”

With regard to the future of L.A.’s infrastructure, Lubell has mixed feelings. Yes, the Purple Line is being built to make travel from downtown to the Westside more palatable, but L.A. will never achieve what that subway plan from the 1920s would have accomplished, he says.

“L.A. is still a place where it’s hard to do very innovative work. Some of the best architects in the world don’t get to work here or don’t get to do their best work. I hope we can up the level of design,” he says. “Such a vast city has to be a culture of visionary architecture.”

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Besides raising money through foundation events, Lubell and his co-curator, Greg Goldin, have also set up a Kickstarter campaign to enlist the community’s help in raising $40,000 to fund the exhibit. They’ve been pleasantly surprised by the support they’ve received so far and feel the community is really embracing the project.

With an impending February deadline, the campaign is a little more than halfway to its goal. That doesn’t seem to worry Lubell.

“All I can say is that we’re going to make it,” he says.

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