Ferriss, Hugh 1889-1962

FERRISS, HUGH 1889-1962

Architectural delineator

Recorder and Inspirer

Hugh Ferriss was a trained architect whose preferred tools were paper and charcoal pencils. For more than three decades beginning in the 1920s, he was America's most-respected "delineator"—artistic renderer—of urban architecture. As delineator he provided both early design sketches and fully developed presentation drawings for more than one hundred architectural firms during the 1920s. Many of these commissioned drawings were published in trade journals, popular magazines, and newspapers, as were Ferriss's noncommercial visions of the urban scene. Recording the evolution of city architecture, particularly of the skyscraper, Ferriss's drawings also helped inspire and direct the changes that occurred during the decade.

Early Life and Career

Ferriss was born in Saint Louis, where he earned an architectural degree from Washington University in 1911. After a year as an apprentice draftsman with the architectural firm of Mariner and La Beaume, he left Saint Louis to take a draftsman position in the New York office of Cass Gilbert, architect of the Woolworth Building, then nearing completion. Following two years with Gilbert and with his encouragement, Ferris decided in 1915 to try to establish a career for himself as an independent architectural delineator. He lived with his wife, Dorothy Lapham, a Vanity Fair illustrator, in Greenwich Village and found freelance work as an artist for magazines, newspapers, and building-industry manufacturers and trade associations. By 1921 Ferriss had become quite well known, and his drawings were regularly exhibited in architectural shows and in the print media.

The Four Stages

In 1916 New York had passed a zoning law that regulated the upper-level mass of tall buildings by prescribing setbacks to ensure light and air circulation to the streets below. During the war years and the recession that followed, the zoning law was virtually ignored, but as construction boomed in 1921, architects began to question how they could fulfill the requirements of the law while providing interesting and functional buildings. In 1922 Fcrriss produced, at the invitation of skyscraper designer and city planner Harvey Wiley Corbett, a set of drawings illustrating what the two envisioned as the "Four Stages" of skyscraper construction. These drawings began with a carved out pyramidal mass and concluded with a structure cut away into aesthetically pleasing setbacks that provided maximum office space and fulfilled the requirements of both steel-cage construction and the zoning law. Ferriss's design s—which were exhibite d in architectural and art shows throughout the country and widely reprinted in newspapers and magazines—caused a sensation in the architectural community. They clearly provided skyscraper builders with exciting alternatives to the simple piling up of ever smaller rectangles from base to summit. Ferriss declared in a New York Times Magazine article: "We are not contemplating the new architecture of a city. We are contemplating the new architecture of a civilization." With the profusion of pyramidal, setback skyscrapers in American cities during the mid to late 1920s, Ferriss's statement proved less hyperbolic than it might at first have seemed.

Influences: Corbett and Hood

Although he provided delineations for architectural firms ranging from the most conservative to the most experimental, Ferriss was primarily influenced by the two visionary skyscraper designers, Corbett and Raymond M. Hood. Corbett engaged Ferriss to illustrate multilevel traffic systems to alleviate the automobile congestion that was one of Corbett's chief concerns; he also invited the delineator to participate in a futuristic exhibition, the Titan City, at the New York John Wanamaker department store, a show that included drawings of skyscrapers with businesses in their lower levels and penthouse apartments and terraced roofs above, aircraft landing areas, and a skyscraper church. With Hood, Fcrriss developed drawings of slender, tall, widely spaced towers, one group covered in masonry and a later group in glass. Hood also was the inspiration for Ferriss's illustration of luxury apartments built into an enormous expansion bridge. Both Corbett and Hood tended to streamline form and do away with extraneous decoration in their skyscrapers, and these characteristics were also favored by their delineator.

The Metropolis of Tomorrow

In 1929 Ferris published The Metropolis of Tomorrow, a magnificent collection of his drawings with an evocative accompanying text. In its three sections the book examines what Ferriss regarded as the best of contemporary urban buildings; his prophecies for architectural developments in the future; and his formulations for an urban utopia. The buildings that he praises in the first part of The Metropolis of Tomorrow —including Chicago's Tribune Tower, Detroits Penobscot Building, and New York's Chanin Building and Chrysler Building—are all massive, monumental, and, in Ferriss's drawings at least, stripped of excessive decoration. "Projected Trends," part 2 of the book, focuses particularly upon setback buildings with terraces, penthouses, and roof gardens, and includes visual warnings of the dire situations that would develop—building and traffic congestion, for example—if urban planning were not embraced. In section three of The Metropolis of Tomorrow Ferriss presents his ideal city divided into three major zones, Business, Science, and Art, in which giant pyramidal structures on bases covering four to eight city blocks were surrounded by low-rise buildings laid out on geometric grids. At the center of this "Imaginary City" sat a large park. The diagram of the city as a whole, with its three major zones and assorted subzones, resembled a six-pointed star. Impractical due to its failure to illustrate or discuss institutional buildings such as schools and hospitals, the placement and design of factories, and the various forms of residential structures, The Metropolis of Tomorrow nonetheless stirred considerable discussion about the nature—and the future—of the city in America.

Final Years

The years during which building construction almost entirely ceased hit Ferriss hard. There was little work available for delineators, and he was forced to return to illustrating advertisements to support himself and his family. In 1936, however, he was appointed delineator and design consultant for the 1939 New York World's Fair, the theme of which was "Building the World of Tomorrow." Yet the fair, with its emphasis on air travel and superhighways, proved to be more the vision of industrial designers Norman Bel Geddes and Henry Dreyfuss than of Ferriss. In the early 1940s the Architectural League of New York awarded him a Brunner travel grant to visit and draw outstanding structures built in American since 1929. Among the structures on which he focused were hydroelectric dams, airports, bridges, grain elevators, factories, highways, and housing projects, with only a few representations of skyscrapers. These drawings from the early 1940s later appeared as part of his 1953 collection Power in Buildings. Between 1946 and 1949 he served as design consultant and delineator for the United Nations Building in New York City, his last major project. Though he produced distinguished work during the 1930s and 1940s, Hugh Ferriss secured his enduring reputation in the 1920s. During that decade he both recorded and significantly influenced the development of urban architecture in America.

Sources:

Hugh Ferriss, "The New Architecture," New York Times Magazine, 19 March 1922, p. 8;

Ferriss, Power in Buildings: An Artist's View of Contemporary Architecture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953);

"Hugh Ferriss, 72, Architect Here," New York Times, 30 January 1962, p. 29;

Carol Willis, "Drawing Towards Metropolis," in The Metropolis of Tomorrow (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1986—fac-simile reprint of Ferriss's 1929 hook), pp. 148-199.