This time i am introducing you next to photographers, illustrators and other artists the first architect and delineator on my side: Hugh Ferriss.
Born in 1889 in St. Louis, he was trained as an architect at Washington University in his town and began already very early to specialize in creating architectural renderings for other architects' work rather than designing buildings himself. Arriving in New York in 1912 he works immediately as a delineator for Cass Gilbert. Some of his earliest drawings are of Gilbert’s Woolworth Building. Ferriss never designed a single noteworthy building but influenced the mid-twenties architects more than any other man. His drawings were being regularly featured by such diverse publications as Century, the Christian Science Monitor, Harper's Magazine and Vanity Fair.
One of those publications is his book "The Metropolis of Tomorrow" which contains his beautiful idealistic and poetically expressed ideas about the then current state of urban architecture in New York - including the zoning laws of 1916. His ideas for cities of the future e.g involved rows of towering skyscrapers separated by multi-lane superhighways. Buildings were shown at night, lit up by spotlights, or in a fog, as if photographed with a soft focus. The shadows cast by and on the building became almost as important as the revealed surfaces. I simply love the dark monumentality ain his megacities and the way he can reduce buildings to their profound power of their simple mass.
If you have a look at Gotham City you might imagine where the inspiration came from...
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Ferrissand Perisphere 
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Woolworth Building, NYC Night In The Science Zone
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One of those publications is his book "The Metropolis of Tomorrow" which contains his beautiful idealistic and poetically expressed ideas about the then current state of urban architecture in New York - including the zoning laws of 1916. His ideas for cities of the future e.g involved rows of towering skyscrapers separated by multi-lane superhighways. Buildings were shown at night, lit up by spotlights, or in a fog, as if photographed with a soft focus. The shadows cast by and on the building became almost as important as the revealed surfaces. I simply love the dark monumentality ain his megacities and the way he can reduce buildings to their profound power of their simple mass.
If you have a look at Gotham City you might imagine where the inspiration came from...
No Title No Title Ferrissand Perisphere No title No title No Title "Buildings like crystal.
Walls of translucent glass.
Sheer glass blocks sheeting a steel grill.
No Gothic branch.
No Acanthus leaf.
No recollections of the plant world.
A mineral kingdom.
Gleaming stalagmites.
Forms as cold as ice.
Mathematics.
Night in the Science zone."
The Art Center
The Science Center
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