Abandoned Engineering

The world is peppered with examples of incredible engineering projects and buildings designed to make life easier for those that used them, amaze those that came to see them — and make money for those that ordered, designed and built them.

They were the stuff of dreams. Often, as we’ll see in these shows, on occasion enormous engineering problems had to me resolved, obstacles overcome and new innovations employed just to get them built in the first place.

Alas, a great number of these remarkable structures have now been abandoned, cast aside like enormous expensive out-of-date toys, never to be used in the ways for which they were intended. Some fell prey to political arguments and financial problems or were perhaps unable to defy the passing years, the pace of new technologies or the vagaries of fads and fashion. Others failed because they were simply monstrous testimonies to the vanity, greed and sheer stupidity of the people that built them.