Prats Nogueras Blanchard is delighted to present The architecture of the unbuilt, an exhibition by Christo & Jeanne-Claude on the occasion of Barcelona Gallery Weekend, bringing together a series of unrealized projects by the artists.

All our projects involve areas, whether urban or rural, where people live. Jeanne-Claude and I have always been interested in the space that people use. We’ve always said it was wonderful to lend us the spaces that belonged to others.

(Christo)

When Christo fled Bulgaria in early 1957, he was 21 and desperate to escape the suffocating dogmas of Socialist Realism. After years at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia, he bribed a railway worker and escaped in a sealed freight car, crossing into Austria, where he renounced his passport and requested political asylum. That dramatic rupture from totalitarianism shaped his belief in autonomy—personal, political, and artistic—for the rest of his life.

By March 1958, Christo had settled in Paris. In his modest studio, he threw himself into experimentation, free from state-imposed doctrine, influenced instead by the energy of the Parisian avant-garde. Still lifes, abstractions, Cubist echoes, and sculptural reliefs piled up on the walls. Portrait commissions—what he half-jokingly referred to as “prostitution”—paid the rent. One of those early jobs introduced him to Jeanne-Claude, whose mother had commissioned family portraits. What began as a friendship quickly became a love story and, ultimately, a partnership that would last a lifetime.

It wasn’t long before Christo’s attention shifted from traditional painting to objects—ordinary things: cans, bottles, crates. He began wrapping them, concealing them beneath fabric, rope, and glue. These early packages were raw, tactile, encrusted in sand or varnish. But soon, the materials became lighter. Cloth was no longer sealed but allowed to breathe. Objects weren’t silenced but suspended—stripped of their original function but not their form. Protected, veiled, paused. This in-between condition would become the very essence of his later, monumental work.

Small objects could no longer contain the scale of his ambition. By the time he and Jeanne-Claude moved to New York in 1964, his attention had fully shifted to space and architecture. His art would no longer be confined to the studio—it would transform entire landscapes.

And yet, the studio remained vital. “Drawing is very important. It gives me energy,” Christo used to say. He drew alone, without assistants, his graphite tracing the shape of an idea through layers of paper and silence. These works were never mere sketches, but elaborate compositions, integrating traditional media—pencil, charcoal, pastel—with tape, fabric, string, plastic, industrial paint. They were visual manifestos: part concept drawing, part poetic vision, part engineering draft.

Photographs—often taken by Harry Shunk, Gianfranco Gorgoni, and later Wolfgang Volz—became raw material. Christo cut into them, painted over them, folded them into drawings and collages. They weren’t just documentation—they were tools, components of the creative process.

He often referred to his work as “architectural,” and his drawings reflect that. Blueprints, topographies, site maps, even wind direction or technical load information found their way into the compositions. They could be read as much as looked at. Layered, sculptural, and deeply tactile, the drawings have a physical presence reminiscent of Jean Dubuffet—an early influence. They chart the arc from idea to realization. They are not just records of what was built, but of how it came to be.

Hence, the dawn of all Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects was never just fabric or scaffolding, but a line.

For Christo, drawing was never a mere tool of preparation—it was a declaration. Before the permits, before the fundraising, before the engineers, there was always a drawing. As a child in Bulgaria, Christo’s first instinct was to observe and transcribe the world around him, distilling the essence of people and places through pencil and paper. This practice remained central throughout his life. Nestled in the solitude of his fifth-floor studio at 48 Howard Street, Christo would return daily to drawing as both meditation and genesis.

Each unrealized project began here. His hands composed elaborate collages, conjuring visions with architectural precision and poetic breath. These were not mere drafts—they were active agents in the life of a project, charged with the energy of what might be. As Christo once noted, a drawing marked the beginning of the final experience: it was through a drawing that a project first came into being—initially in the mind of its creator, then in the minds of those who supported or opposed it. “The last drawing is the closest to reality,” he said, “because it has benefitted from all the information, from real relationships between things, from all the reflection. With it, the vision crystallizes.”

Many realized works—Running fence, The pont neuf wrapped, The gates—share a common DNA with those that remained on paper. Both begin with the same visionary impulse and undergo the same gestational process. Yet the unrealized ones, precisely because they were never subject to compromise or constraint, often reveal a purer, more radical ambition. They live suspended in the atmosphere of imagination—mapped out in charcoal, layered in fabric samples. Some projects never made it to earth. But for Christo and Jeanne-Claude, realization was never the only measure of existence. What mattered was the vision, the process, the act of imagining with clarity and conviction.

To speak of Christo’s drawings is to enter a space of becoming. It is where impossibilities take shape, where bureaucracy is irrelevant, and the scale of imagination has no limit. For the projects that were never realized—either by fate or by choice—these works remain as testimonies, evidence of worlds imagined with extraordinary clarity and devotion.

Each project Christo and Jeanne-Claude embarked on began without a blueprint. No repetitions, no formulas—only the willingness to start anew and see where the process would lead. Every work was a slow unfolding, shaped by a changing constellation of forces: people, places, permissions, time. This openness—to discovery, to resistance, to failure—was their method. It demanded radical freedom. And with it, the courage to step into the unknown, to work without guarantees, to engage with the world as it is: layered, unpredictable, alive.

For them, the artwork was never just the final installation. It was everything that led to it: the early sketches, the town hall meetings, the legal battles, the material tests, the political negotiations, the act of building. Their art unfolded in time and through people—it wasn’t a fixed object, but a process that moved across drawing boards, offices, landscapes, and lived experience. This is what they meant by environmental art. Not just site-specific, but deeply entangled with its surroundings: physical, social, emotional.

In this sense, the true material of their work was not fabric or rope, but humanity. Their projects took place in cities and public spaces, in places where life happens. And they mirrored life’s fundamental condition: impermanence. In doing so, they became profound acts of humanism.

This is the power of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s art. They expanded the boundaries of what art could be—inviting the public not just to look, but to feel, to resist, to wonder. Their projects stirred debate long before they appeared and lived on long after they disappeared. They weren’t meant to last—yet they left a lasting mark.

Their unrealized projects — some halted by politics, others by economics, or simply the friction of reality — are not failures. They are alternate monuments: invisible yet dense with intent. They exist in the drawings, the collages, the maquettes, the photographs — what they called 'preparation,' but which — in truth was part of the art itself. 'The work exists when it is planned,' Christo once said, and in that planning, it became tangible.

Each unrealized project is not a shadow—it is a presence. In the case of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, it is often the purest form of the work. Where realization required permits, logistics, legal teams, and environmental assessments, the drawing answered only to the vision. Unrealized projects are, therefore, fully born. They are not unfulfilled; they are fulfilled in a different register.

Urban visions, temporary geographies and transitory monuments

In 1961, Christo envisioned wrapping a public building — a short, typed proposal, complete with a list of dream sites: “Train station. Post office. Opera house.” One of the first to be documented was Paris’s École Militaire, whose architectural gravitas and position overlooking the Champ de Mars made it an ideal candidate. But permissions were denied. Even Jeanne-Claude’s adoptive father, General Jacques de Guillebon, couldn’t shift the bureaucracy. So, the project was abandoned.

Another missed opportunity: Wrapped trees along the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Commissioned as a festive installation for Christmas 1969, the project was developed rapidly — but collapsed under the weight of official delay. Permits withheld, obstacles multiplied. Christmas lights were installed instead. The wrapped trees, though unrealized then, would finally find life in 1998, on the grounds of the Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland.

In New York, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s vision expanded vertiginously. They proposed to wrap entire skyscrapers — the 20 exchange place tower and 2 Broadway. The idea was not just to clothe these buildings, but to interrogate their presence: Art Deco and Modernist forms bound in fabric, architectural tension suspended. The next turned to One Times Square next, in 1967. More isolated, more visible. Negotiations progressed until the curtain wall’s insurance policy broke the spell. Even their 1968 proposal for the Museum of Modern Art — a wrapped façade, an inflatable Air package in the garden, an oil barrels structure, Wrapped trees — fell to institutional nerves in a year marked by protest, assassination, and political unrest. The museum instead hosted an exhibition titled Christo wraps the museum: scale models, photomontages, and drawings for a non-event.

The oldest bridge in Rome, Ponte Sant'Angelo, which links the Vatican and the City of Rome, was the first one Christo and Jeanne-Claude proposed to wrap, in 1967. At the same time, they also had their first proposal for a wrapped museum, the Galleria Nazionale. None of the projects eventually came to fruition.

Although Christo made some collages using the Sydney Harbor Bridge when he and Jeanne-Claude were in Australia in 1969 to realize the Wrapped coast, they never officially asked permission to wrap the bridge. Three years later, the artists considered to wrap the Pont Alexandre III in Paris but soon abandoned the idea, because the towerless one-arch bridge offered a profile which Christo and Jeanne-Claude considered too skinny, and it also was not really used by pedestrians. Finally, in 1975, Christo and Jeanne-Claude decided to wrap the Pont-Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris. The project was realized ten years later.

In 1974, Christo and Jeanne-Claude failed to get permission to wrap three of Geneva's landmarks, the Mur des réformateurs, le Jet d’eau and the monument to Général Dufour. Christo had lived in that city for several months before arriving in Paris in 1958. After moving to Paris, he often went back to Geneva to paint oil-on-canvas portraits in order to earn a living, since his early works were difficult to sell.

Most of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's non-realized projects failed because permission was denied. One of the few exceptions was the Wrapped monument to Cristobal Colón, a project envisioned for Barcelona in 1975. After having received two refusals, the permit was granted in 1984 by Pasqual Maragall, the Mayor of Barcelona, but the idea of a wrapped monument was no longer in the heart of the artists and Christo and Jeanne-Claude decided to no longer pursue the project.

Not all architecture is built of stone. Some is made of air, fabric, and light — and some of vision alone.

For Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the city was not the only stage. Nature, too, could be veiled, sculpted, briefly interrupted. Their unrealized projects unfold across continents: wrapped trees, floating walkways, barrel walls, and mastabas, each echoing the same impulse — to transform the familiar, to disturb gently, to awaken perception.

While visiting Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Japan in 1969, Christo and Jeanne-Claude became aware of the ceremonial use of gardens. They noticed the way the inhabitants of these countries were attuned to their surroundings, especially to the surface upon which they walked. In 1970, they proposed Wrapped walkways in Sonsbeek Park in the Netherlands — paths rendered ephemeral under swaths of fabric. A parallel project was conceived for Ueno Park in Tokyo, inspired by the ceremonial relationship between walkers and land in Southeast Asia. Both proposals were denied. Later attempts — in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts park (1971) and Dublin’s St. Stephen’s Green (1976) — met similar fates. Only in 1978, in Kansas City’s Loose Park, did Wrapped walkways come to life, rippling like a soft topography across the grass. Their ideas often moved in pairs: mirrored proposals for Japan and the U.S., the Netherlands and Ireland.

Among the most developed of their projects left unrealized was Over the river — a shimmering sequence of translucent fabric panels suspended above the Arkansas River in Colorado. First conceived in 1992 and progressed for more than two decades, it was as ambitious as it was controversial. Legal resistance, environmental litigation, and bureaucratic delay kept it in limbo until, in 2017, Christo withdrew the project in protest of the political climate.

In 1996, The daiba project imagined floating saffron piers rising from Tokyo Bay. Their scale was staggering: 90,000 square meters of fabric, walkways connecting islands, fabric climbing the stairs of the Fuji TV building like a cascade. Viewers would walk, sit, recline upon it — participants in a choreography of color and tactility. But negotiations collapsed, and the dream dissolved into saffron-colored renderings and annotated maps.

And then there were the mastabas. From the 1960s on, the mastaba — a geometric form from ancient Mesopotamia — an A-line shaped mud bench — became a recurring figure in their work. The first appeared in 1961 in Cologne Harbor as a result of stacking oil barrels horizontally and was modest in size. Later versions were proposed for Saint-Paul-de-Vence, the Netherlands, Texas, Japan, London. Most of them remained unbuilt. And yet their absence was not a void but a presence — a form rehearsed in drawing, modeled in scale, planned with care. The grandest of these, The mastaba for Abu Dhabi, remains an exception: the only project still intended for future construction, per Christo’s final wishes.

This is how many of their projects lived — not always linearly, but like echoes. Ideas would reappear in altered forms, on new continents, decades later. Each unrealized project seemed to contain another within it — a twin in exile, waiting to surface elsewhere. What mattered was not the calendar, it was never a matter of patience, but passion.

The unrealized works span the globe, mapping a counter-geography of artistic ambition. If the works never arrived, the journeys still did. Every drawing, every maquette, was a site. Every failed permit a chapter. They built with absence. They drew monuments that didn’t need to rise to resonate.

Freedom as form

To speak of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s unrealized projects is not to speak of what was lost. It is to speak of what was imagined and actively pursued— fiercely, fully, and without compromise.

Their practice was always an act of resistance: against permanence, against commodification, against institutional dependence. They self-financed every project. They rejected commissions. They declined sponsorships. That insistence on independence cost them many realizations, but it gave their work an extraordinary purity — a radical clarity of purpose.

This clarity is visible not just in the windblown majesty of The gates or the luminous drift of The floating Piers, but equally in the unbuilt. In the moody photomontages by Harry Shunk, where buildings dissolve into veils; in the taped edges and pasted maps of Christo’s working collages; in drawings where pastel and string wrap not just monuments but space itself.

Their unrealized projects are a kind of architecture — the architecture of what might have been. Each proposal, whether blocked by politics or faltered by logistics, remains etched with conviction. They speak to freedom: artistic, civic, imaginative.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude believed that freedom was their only material. No commissions, no compromises, no ownership. It is within this framework that the unrealized works take on their full force. They are works of total autonomy, bound not by physical site but by conviction. Jeanne-Claude often said, “We want to create works of joy and beauty, which we will build because we believe in them, and we alone are responsible for them.” Whether realized or not, their works assert a kind of artistic sovereignty.

To see these projects only in terms of what they did not become is to misunderstand them. They are not failures. They are not gaps. They are complete thoughts—drawn, documented, imagined, and remembered. Some works were made to exist in paper and pigment, in dialogue and desire. They ask us to expand our definitions of sculpture, architecture, and temporality. They ask us to imagine freedom as a form.

Even projects that were never built left a mark. They altered how we think about landscape, about sculpture, about what it means to wrap, to veil, to make visible by temporarily hiding. They were discussed, opposed, applauded, litigated, celebrated. And then — sometimes — they simply lived on paper.

In this way, the drawings are not documents. They are the events. They hold within them all the complexity of each project: the surveys, the hearings, the engineering, the doubt, the hope, the long waiting. Every unrealized project was, in its own right, a complete artwork. Not a sketch of a possibility, but a portrait of one.

Jeanne-Claude once said “Artists never retire. They simply die.”

And the unrealized projects — the mastabas still unbuilt, the monuments still wrapped only in dream, the cities never transformed — these are not ghosts. They are futures that exist in a state of waiting. Breathable, reachable, unforgettable.

In the end, what Christo and Jeanne-Claude offered was a radical act of faith: in process over product, in imagination over material, in the transformative power of vision — whether it ever touches the earth or not.