Ferriss' Future-Perfect

". . . There are occasional mornings when, with an early fog not yet dispersed, one finds oneself . . . stepping onto the parapet. . . . Literally, there is nothing to be seen but mist. . . . What apocalypse is about to be revealed? . . . Soon, somewhere off in the mist, a single lofty highlight of gold appears: the earliest beam is upon the tip of the Metropolitan Tower. ..."

Standing thus before the picture window of his penthouse studio, Hugh Ferriss, U.S. architecture's most grandiose seer, has often watched dawn come to Manhattan. In that same studio for 17 years he has let his imagination conjure up the future city--magnificent crystal towers, highways like gleaming strips of satin, the aerial span of bridges. For a quarter-century his penciled imaginings have decorated the rotogravure section of the New York Times, the pages of architectural magazines. A professional at architectural "rendering," and otherwise untrammeled by blueprints and specifications, Hugh Ferriss long ago evolved his own self-definition: visualizer. Last week Hugh Ferriss came down to earth.

In Manhattan's Whitney Museum hung 24 crayon sketches by Ferriss of the finest buildings the U.S. has put up in the past decade. Looming out of the mist like Manhattan at dawn were mighty grain elevators, dizzy-deep dams, steel and glass factories streamlined toward infinity, an outdoor amphitheater scooped like some monumental sculpture.

To record "The Power of America in Buildings," as the exhibition was called, Ferriss spent ten months and a $2,000 Arnold W. Brunner grant which the Architectural League of New York gave him last year. With his artist wife as aide and chief stander-by and his Swarthmore daughter Jean, who was gathering material for a thesis (The Effects of Locality on Authors), Ferriss motored 18,000 miles.

He concluded that the era of banks and skyscrapers is at an end, as indeed it has been since Franklin Roosevelt took office. In the decade covered by the exhibition there have been almost no major skyscraper projects except Rockefeller Center. Ferriss once called the skyscraper the "hieroglyph of capitalism, commercialism, and confusion--a symbol of an age in which there is no spirituality." In the '20s New York's cube-like buildings were getting higher & higher. New York streets darker & darker, New York traffic denser & denser, when the city decreed that, buildings, after reaching a moderate height, must "step back" as they rose. Architects were horrified at such restrictions on "individual initiative." But Visualizer Ferriss, who got his early architectural experience sketching full-size details for the Woolworth Building, evolved a basic skyscraper form which became the pattern for such buildings as the Shelton Hotel, one of the first important stepped-back skyscrapers, and later for much of the New York skyline. While adopting the stepped-back skyscraper form, New York did not observe Ferriss' plea that skyscrapers be placed half a mile apart. Of Big City Grand Canyons, Ferriss says he has seen enough.

Other Ferriss conclusions:

> That the Government-dominated architecture of the Roosevelt era is consistently good.

> That Architects Albert Kahn, with his aircraft plants, Roland Wank, with his TVA dams. Eliel Saarinen, with his educational buildings, and Frank Lloyd Wright with his famed Johnson Building, are tops.

> That massive power plants, trim airports, handsome broadcasting stations and telephone buildings, gleaming factories and farflung highways, truly express the character of the day. Says Hugh Ferriss: "Architecture never lies."

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