A Ferriss to Remember

For Rem Koolhaas, New York City hit its creative peak during the skyscraper heyday of the twenties and thirties, when tall buildings were the thing, and everyone from John D. Rockefeller to King Kong knew it. Hugh Ferriss also knew it; he was a strange, quiet man who drew buildings, and his name doesn't mean much to most people today. Oddly enough, though, most people come to New York expecting a Hugh Ferriss city. Ferriss almost singlehandedly invented Gotham: smoky, nighttime New York, full of heroic skyscrapers and anonymous ant people. For Ferriss, New York was more than itself, for he saw in its form the germ of a new and monumental urbanism which he dreamt up and put on paper. His designs were naive and crazy and compelling enough to influence entire generations of architects, and his vision of the future was unique and mesmerizing enough to take New York's identity hostage.

Hugh Ferriss started his career as a lowly architectural renderer, processing the ideas of others for public consumption. He could master detail, but he never got lost in fussiness, and even his early drawings denote a preference for mood and essence over minute representation. Still, his broad strokes were not about off-the-cuff expressionism; Ferriss simply felt that the meaning of a thing was in the grand idea, not the details. He once recounted having done a seemingly accurate rendering of the same building for both a terracotta and a window glass manufacturer. Both demanded he revise the drawing as he had clearly misunderstood the structure: each client claimed the building was an essay in the use of a certain material- terracotta and glass, respectively. As his work matured, Ferriss tolerated such myopia less and less; when he rendered designs, he drew them as he wanted to seem them. In his world, the sky darkens and the lights get brighter; one generally sees the structure as if from an adjacent skyscraper. The heaviest shadows settle down to the street level while bright lights coat the skyscrapers with a drama generally reserved for bad experimental theater.

By the mid-twenties, renderings by Ferriss had become almost de rigeur for successful competition projects; countless timid, also-ran skyscrapers waited their turn to be bathed in the dark monumentality emanating from his drafting table. In these works a blasé department store appears as a giant lording over its block. Stodgy hotels cease to be stodgy hotels and become looming silhouettes emerging from the urban haze like shipwrecks. Ferriss went to grand new lengths in suppressing detail for mood, and clients loved it. It hardly mattered that the renderings sometimes tip into abstraction: they do so only to create a mood of bloated space that gratified the ambitions of the day. Eventually, though, even this proved insufficient for Ferriss' own ego. He was not content simply to give existent buildings a new image; he wanted new buildings, indeed a wholly new city.

Since Ferriss the illustrator never suffered from literal mindedness in his work, the evolution of Ferriss the urban visionary made perfect sense. His first major prophecy used the set-back zoning laws in New York to codify a style of tapering skyscraper that became the model for structures like the Empire State and Chrysler buildings. In 1916, fears of a skyline made too dense with tall buildings had led the city to pass a zoning ordinance requiring structures to narrow as they grew higher. For several years war, economic recession, and creative lassitude impeded anyone from finding a truly interesting model using the limitations. Then the recovery of the twenties came, and in 1922 Ferriss published his drawings, wherein he demonstrated how the ordinance could generate buildings that appeared even more dramatic and towering than their blocky predecessors. Ferriss' invention was doubly effective: not only did he prompt other architects to follow his lead, he fit existing structures within an archetype that still defines the city.

Truthfully, though, these prescriptions were hardly technical; they barely rendered actual buildings at all, but rather boxes morphing into steely, streamlined spires. In other words, the details of the proposal weren't what stuck in the minds of those poor impressionable architects; it was all mood and shapes. The city of the future would be sharp, yet sensual. It would be sleek and exacting, but also sculptural and expressive. Tapering structures had been done before, but Ferriss' designs brought an entirely new image to skyscrapers precisely because they were so dreamlike. He already took such liberties with his visualizations of actual buildings that his own designs were a natural outgrowth of his constant re-imagining.

Ferriss' concern with remaking both the image and typology of the city reached its most original, enduring expression in his 1929 masterpiece publication, The Metropolis of Tomorrow. In a stroke of grand hubris, Ferriss included renderings he had done for clients as the tiny germinations for his own grandiose urban designs. Most of these projects were located in New York and derived their forms from its setback requirements; other cities chipped in a few renderings, often as evidence of New York's influence. As such, those interested in seeing the first realized images of the future would know where to go; New York was the city of tomorrow, and Ferriss was its prophet. His prophecies, like his response to the set-back requirements, were not unprecedented, but they outdid previous models in both their visual splendor and their size. Ferriss advocated vast blocks of planned space, generally involving lower buildings ascending up to one skyscraper whose dimensions would be considered impossible even today. He considered such spaces more cohesive, and less susceptible to the unruly chaos of street life. Superblock spaces like Rockefeller Center, which close off cross streets to create miniature fiefdoms, are the progeny of this model. Ferriss' most fantastic work is found here: sprawling swoops and jutting spires abound everywhere, creating urban forms that are both otherworldly and eerily familiar. Somewhere in the intoxicating mess of Ferriss' visions lurk the forms of traditional skyscrapers, the kind he inflated and mythologized for a living. Perhaps the renderings of built structures legitimate Ferriss' crazy designs; by placing the work of his patrons within an urban narrative culminating in his imaginary city, Ferriss made those buildings his own. But he had given them their visual identity anyway; the relationship between the brick city of New York and the paper city in Metropolis was intensely symbiotic, and it continues to be. New York may not build on the scale it did during the twenties, but whenever it gets the chance it shows it remains enamored with Ferriss after all these years. There is no better example than the World Trade Center competition design, which is little more than a Ferriss superblock distorted by both political and architectural tragedy. Sure, the Freedom Tower looks a little beaten-up and broken, but such is the fate of tired tropes. And Ferriss' smoky charcoal has been traded for the equally unreal and maudlin white glow of digital rendering programs. Still, the basic pattern is undoubtedly there. The smaller buildings point subserviently to the central tower, all lifted up from the rest of the city grid. Looking at this updated ghost, one is astounded that the capitol of the world is still taken with ideas so vintage and so naive. One might be justifiably grateful that Ferriss' cities never got beyond the drawing board in full, but his vision hardly lost out. Hugh Ferriss celebrated engineering, economics, and zoning, yet these very things ensured he would never build anything. Nonetheless, New York escaped the full physical form of the Metropolis of Tomorrow only to be enraptured hopelessly by its essence. Ferriss' drawings aren't buildings but rather postcards sent from Manhattan's projected and inflated image of itself; decades later, the city is still admiring them.

-Michael Mallow