Had they actually been built, these buildings could have probably gone either way.

Sometimes, the line between a brilliant idea and a psychotically suicidal one is so fine that it practically doesn't exist. Other times, the line is so wide it would take a transcontinental railroad and an entire week to cross it.

5 The Palace of the Soviets

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Picture the Empire State Building. Now, imagine someone glued the Statue of Liberty to the top. You've now imagined a much less crazy version of the Palace of the Soviets.

Joseph Stalin, during his "crazy stage" (1870-1953), had a big problem. After Vladimir Lenin's death, the peasantry went cuckoo for monuments to their fallen leader, and it was up to Joe to deliver. If displaying Lenin's corpse in a glass case wasn't good enough for these people, a cheesy statue in a park probably wouldn't be enough, either. The Soviets demanded something FABULOUS.

Via Dan Iggers

And something to keep King Kong away, too, we suspect.

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So Stalin came up with a plan. First, he blew up the beautiful 70-year-old church that was clearly in prime monument real estate:

Via Wikipedia

Second, he held a contest allowing the best architects in the world to compete for the winning monument design. And if "the world's greatest memorial to hubris" was what Stalin wanted, the winning entry delivered in spades. What he chose was a 100-floor, 1,392-foot building towering over Moscow, which would have been a full 100 feet taller than the Empire State Building. Then, on top of that, was to be a 260-foot-tall statue of Lenin. So actually we understated it before -- it'd be like the Statue of Liberty on top of the Empire State Building, THEN ANOTHER SLIGHTLY SMALLER STATUE OF LIBERTY ON TOP OF THAT ONE. That's how tall the statue would have been.