Image Courtesy of Manuel Dominguez
Architect Manuel Dominguez's "Very Large Structure," a self contained city on treads, would relocate as climate and resources changes.
Image Courtesy of Poseidon Undersea Resorts
一艘美国潜艇制造商订单有2.15亿美元seidon Undersea Resort, a 40,000-sq-ft hotel module complex to be built 45 ft underwater off the coast of Fiji, possibly by mid-2016. He claims 225,000 potential customers have signed up for updates.

伦敦的设计师希望将污染的城市转变为封闭的环境避风港，本可以将更为验证的大地圆顶作为其技术。取而代之的是，该公司坚持一个仍然粗略的想法，即受压力电缆支持的膨胀方法（即使没有所有者或结构工程师，”一位建筑师说，“因为它很漂亮”。

A project to build a record-setting bridge linking Italy and Sicily and a Chinese-led one to carve a canal through Nicaragua three times longer and 10 times costlier than the Panama Canal strain the limits of technical, economic and political reality. Yet these projects have persisted as dreams for decades, if not centuries, and still have supporters, if not very ardent proponents.

While some projects may remain fantasies on paper or in engineers' minds far into the future, if not indefinitely, others are inching closer to reality—helping their conceptors to perfect technology and project feasibility skills, and to better weigh benefits against emerging global impacts.

"Dreaming is a core part of the human condition," says Robert Prieto, senior vice president of Fluor Corp., who has written extensively on the management of very large projects.

"If you don't dream or conceive of what is possible, you can never improve or move the ball down field. In the 1960s, someone dreamed about creating a way to have computers move information among themselves, and it became the internet."

He adds: "The most compelling projects will make you uncomfortable, and everything we do is constrained. But in dreaming, you can find ways to overcome constraints."

Prieto and others say the Panama waterway, not to mention America's historic engineering marvels, such as the Erie Canal, transcontinental railroad and interstate highway system, all were once "aspirational."

In a recent speech to engineers in Panama, Major Gen. John Peabody, Army Corps of Engineers deputy commanding general for civil and emergency operations, quoted a passage on his late brother's computer: "A dream is just a dream. A goal is a dream with a plan and a schedule." He adds, "The practical issue is, can you get a return on investment and make a sea change in the way things operate in doing these projects?"

如果中国的支持者Nica皮博迪奇迹raguan canal have done a traffic analysis to justify its $50-billion estimated cost. "China sees geopolitical advantage. 'We'll do a dream project because we can,' " he says.

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Dreamworks-Chinese style

If there were no copyright issue with the Hollywood movie studio, "dreamworks" could well describe the government of Xi Jinpingin in China as it proposes grand schemes already tinged by grander controversies.

Huge projects are being announced and initiated almost every week since Xi became president in 2013. In fact, China's love for big projects is not a post- economic reform phenomenon.

Many ambitious projects built in the past decade or under construction—such as the Qinghai-Tibet railway, Three Gorges dam, the Tsangpo dam in the Himalayas and the south-north water diversion—date to the 1950s era of Mao Zedong, former chairman of China's Communist Party.

"In the case of Three Gorges, the need for power, movement of goods, flood control and greenhouse-gas reductions were seen as a reasonable trade-off ... for flooding towns and displacing millions of people," says sustainability consultant William A. Wallace, president of Wallace Futures Group. "Are those reasonable trade-offs? Many people didn't think so."

现在，真正的梦幻般的是中国的计划，即通过160公里的运河将陆上锁定的北京转变为港口，该港口与大海相连。这个想法必须在中央政府批准之前气候抗拒，但观察家说，没有任何计划可能太愚蠢了。

"China needs—more than it likes—these super-projects," He Weiwen, a senior researcher at Beijing's Renmin University, told ENR. But there is more to it than mere necessity. Projects are mostly implemented by giant state-owned firms with access to vast financial resources at low rates. Government policies are often reworked to suit project needs.

"Large projects save cost and help the process of capacity and expertise building," Zha Xiaogang, finance division director at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, told ENR. Shaofeng Jia, vice director of the Center for Water Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, says the five-dam Tsangpo Himalayas project has had no foreign involvement.

Set for completion next year is the 632-meter-high Shanghai Tower, which will be the world's second-highest office building.

Also envisioned is the Silk Road and Maritime Silk Road program, an effort to connect 20, mostly Asian countries with road, rail and sea lanes. There also are plans to build the world's largest pumped-storage power station in north China's Hebei province, with an initial capacity of 3.6 gigawatts.

西班牙建筑学生ManuelDomínguez借用了在石油平台和火箭运输商上使用的工程概念，以开发他的“星球大战”（Star Wars）的“星球大战”（Star Wars），就像胎面上的可移动城市一样，但承认2012年的想法是乌托邦式的，并且是当时试图使他的大学同龄人最好的尝试。