Finding inspiration from the buildings never built.

The Never Built series explores the potential of unbuilt architecture in both Los Angeles and New York. Never Built Los Angeles was the first book in the series, showcasing the history of unbuilt dreams for Los Angeles. The book and exhibition feature buildings, master plans, parks, follies, and mass-transit proposals that never made it past the drawing or model phase. We picked up on the vernacular of architectural drawings—the line work, the title blocks, etc—for the typographic palette as a way to appropriately frame this visual content.

The book’s chapters are organized around building typologies. Each individual project, though, is color-coded to reflect its specific Los Angeles neighborhood, with the exact locations indicated on site maps that introduce each section, giving the reader two ways to parse the book.
Two keepsake posters were designed for sale at an accompanying exhibition at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum.
NBLA Exterior
We adapted the book to create a few graphic moments in the exhibition designed by Clive Wilkinson.

After the success of Never Built Los Angeles, Metropolis books approached us again, this time to tackle New York.