Los Angeles Civic Center – 1925 – Lloyd Wright

Wright’s proposal, submitted to the Los Angeles Times in 1925, consisted of terraced walkways flanked by rows of Mayan Revival government buildings. City Hall would sit at the top of this temple-like complex, while sunken roads, subterranean train tunnels, and rooftop helipads would manage movement in and out of the city. Anaïs Nin, who visited Wright’s studio in the late 1940s, wrote in her diary: ‘I saw [his] plans for LA. It could have been the most beautiful city in the world.’ All images courtesy of Metropolis Books

Tower of Civilisation – 1943 – William H Evans and Donald R Warren

Even at the height of the second world war, the city’s leaders were plotting grandiose schemes for a World Fair. The most outlandish was drawn by bridge engineer Donald R Warren. His 1,200ft-high, 150ft-diameter Tower of Civilisation would have been the world’s tallest structure – with a three mile long ramp coiled around the column leading to an observatory. The outer shell would have ‘colours of the spectrum electrically displayed in vertical bands’. Amid the postwar economic slump, the idea of the fair and the tower fizzled

LAX – 1952 – Pereira and Luckman

Everyone loves to hate the banal drudgery of Los Angeles International Airport, or LAX. But the original design by its architects, Pereira and Luckman, would have inspired awe. Its centerpiece was a multi-storey, glass-clad dome containing every terminal for the now-scattered complex. Emerging from its periphery were six elevated ‘fingers’ designed to whisk passengers to their planes. The plan died because the city’s building department found it too radical, the cost of air-conditioning would have been exorbitant, and the airlines wanted their own terminals

International Marketland – 1959 – WL Couverly

WL Couverly’s lavish drawings of the Las Vegas-like ‘Marketland’, in what was the hinterlands of Orange County, turned out to be the promotional materials for an elaborate scheme by a shady developer, Charles Camarata. The Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Pyramid of Cheops, the Parthenon, Babylonian towers, a Jewish temple, a Moorish mosque, a geodesic dome ... nothing was missing – except money. Camarata never paid for the land and soon landed in bankruptcy court, his scheme a shambles

Metroport – 1965 – AC Martin

Once upon a time the future for Los Angeles transport was helicopters. And at the heart of this thinking was the Metroport, AC Martin’s six-storey, $20m transportation facility attached to the rear of downtown’s Union station. The building was anchored by a bus terminal, but on its roof it contained ample space for helicopter landing. ‘Helicabs,’ said Martin partner J Edward Martin, would become ‘the aerial version of a street taxi’. The most ambitious of these, the Skylounge, combined a bus and a helicopter in one to ferry passengers to and from LAX

Santa Monica offshore freeway – 1965 – John Drescher and Moffat and Nichol

Perhaps no infrastructure in Los Angeles has ever been as ambitious, or destructive, as the Santa Monica offshore freeway; a testament to the city’s mid-century car fever and its appetite to reinvent the future. Hovering over the Santa Monica bay, the $600m raised causeway, lifted over a 30,000ft-long chain of man-made islands, would connect the 10 Freeway in Santa Monica to the Pacific Coast highway in Malibu. Stymied by budget shortages and citizen anger, governor Pat Brown vetoed the project in September 1965

Pacific Ocean Park – 1969 – Daniel, Mann, Johnson and Mendenhall (DMJM)

There hasn’t been a proposal for LA’s seashore quite as bold as Anthony Lumsden’s glass-enclosed, 30-storey cylinder at Venice Beach. Lumsden, the chief designer at DMJM, dreamed up a hotel that ‘is architecturally defined as a circle maximising the 360-degree panorama’. He wasn’t kidding, but his client, John Morehart likely was. The savvy real estate wheeler-dealer was using Lumsden’s design to inflate the value of his holdings to get out of his crushing debt. His gambit succeeded, which then doomed the glass cylinder

People movers – 1970s

Awash in multi-million dollar funding from Washington DC, LA mayor Tom Bradley hoped to bring mass transit to the notoriously transit-starved city. His favourite was the People Mover, a system of elevated automated mini-cars running on twin concrete ‘guideways’ raised three storeys above the middle of downtown’s major streets. But critics condemned it as a ‘$200m boondoggle’. The city’s power elite backed the mayor, but an opposition of architects, would-be preservationists and civil rights groups found an ally in new president Ronald Reagan, who cut off federal funding

Grand Avenue – 1979 – Barton Myers, Pelli, Gehry

Despite attempts to make LA’s Grand Avenue into a thriving cultural destination, it still feels soulless and disconnected. In the late 70s Maguire Partners, a developer, attempted to remedy this by assembling a ‘dream team’ of architects including Frank Gehry, Cesar Pelli, Charles Moore, Hugh Hardy and Barton Myers. The plan consisted of sculptural buildings having little to do with one another. But the genius came from an effort to connect Grand Avenue with the historic core below via a series of intersecting parks, fountains and promenades

Trump Tower – 1989 – Johnson Fain

In LA, Trump bragged he was going to spend a billion dollars on what he claimed would become the world’s tallest building. His architect Bill Fain delivered a gilded 125-storey office tower etched in a diamond-patterned exoskeleton. It would have dwarfed everything in its shadow – looking over one of the city’s poorest immigrant communities. David Martin also devised a skyscraper: ‘When I told Ivana [Trump] the basis of the idea was to put two diamonds together, she lit up,’ Martin said. ‘I think they were divorced a week later.’