A city of rejected dreams: What if?

Ilyce R. Glink
·Yahoo! Homes Contributor

Imagine a city where a Jetsons-style monorail zooms locals around town. A city where a highway jets off the coastline and onto the ocean, headed for a string of man-made islands built as a traffic diversion. A city where architect Frank Lloyd Wright has designed the entire city center.

That city never was.

But it could have been Los Angeles.

In these never-realized proposals of architects, designers and other dreamers, you'll get a rare peek at an alternate universe where a skyscraper hotel rises from the Pacific Ocean and where a sports club that looks like a spaceship perches on a hill. Any major city has a rejected landscape filled with dozens of enormous projects never green-lighted -- but maybe L.A. attracts more than its share of visionaries.

[Click here or on the image above to go to the slideshow.]

We're delighted to bring you some of the most intriguing features drawn from a show that ends this weekend. A companion book called "Never Built Los Angeles" contains even more big ideas -- but if you're lucky enough to see the show in person, it's at A+D Architecture and Design Museum in Los Angeles, co-curated by Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin, and designed by Clive Wilkinson Architects. (At the bottom of this post, you can see the video that helped this project get funded on Kickstarter. Don't miss the glimpse at 1:40 of Disney Sea, a sort of marine Disneyland in Long Beach centered on giant "bubbles" that would have held the world's largest indoor aquariums.)

These unique visions help us dive into the minds of those who proposed them, and those who rejected them. Maybe you'll lament the bold designs lost to shortsighted public officials -- or maybe you'll be thankful they were dodged.

Who wants a hotel in the middle of the ocean, anyway?

Click here or on the image above to go to the slideshow.

Ilyce Glink is an award-winning, nationally syndicated real estate columnist, blogger and radio talk show host, and managing editor of the Equifax Finance Blog. Follow her on Twitter @Glink.