What if Canberra had become Australia's most beautiful city?

In 1911, architects from across the globe competed to design Australia’s new federal capital. The famously sprawling entry by American architect Walter Burley Griffin and his wife, Marion Mahony Griffin, ultimately won, but one extraordinary proposal has largely been forgotten: a compact, walkable city of pale stone, terracotta roofs, blue domes, bustling piazzas and a densely inhabited waterfront, designed by British Arts and Crafts icon Ernest Gimson. Gimson imagined a capital unlike the Canberra we know today: a city brimming with Mediterranean warmth, Arts & Crafts charm and Neo-Byzantine grandeur, yet with a distinctly Australian character. Parliament would crown the landscape above an artificial lake, while a monumental cathedral, university quarter, markets, arcades, shops, apartments and public squares fill the city below. Trams would weave through its streets and a covered colonnade would run for much of the waterfront. Drawing on surviving competition material, contemporary descriptions and later historical research, together with Gimson's architectural influences, this documentary uses historically informed AI reconstruction to create his lost Canberra in photorealistic detail, showing how it might look in the 21st century. The video also delves into the extraordinary competition that created Canberra and brings to life rival visions by Eliel Saarinen, Alfred Agache and the Australian trio Griffiths, Coulter and Caswell, asking the ultimate question: could Gimson’s denser, livelier and more human-scale vision have made a better Australian capital? The Curious Compendium of Architectural What-Ifs explores lost, unbuilt and radically altered buildings and cities, imagining how the world might have looked if history had taken a different path. Subscribe for more high-end architectural history documentaries, including lost city plans, unbuilt skyscrapers, demolished landmarks, buried rivers and forgotten urban visions. #canberra #ErnestGimson #Architecture #ArchitecturalHistory #UrbanPlanning #Australia #AlternateHistory