Hugh Ferris: Forever Future
Babylon is everywhere. You have the good and the bad, and the bad is called Babylon.
That's what Babylon is to me. I could have been born in England. I could have been born in America.
It doesn't matter where you were born, because Babylon is everywhere.
Bob Marley
We drift through the city, choosing to stay with some dreams and some resignations, or to leave.
Hugh Ferris, an American architect active in the 1910s and 1920s, made his name in architectural history without ever designing a building in his lifetime. He specialized in renderings, or drawings of how buildings would look when completed.
The drawings he left behind imprinted the collective unconscious urban landscape in people's memories, and continue to influence that landscape to this day.
New York in the 1920s was a roaring, consumerist city, a place where chaos reigned like a sacrificial temple to the American ideal.
Skyscrapers line the streets, competing for height, and young people race through the streets, their feet firmly on the accelerator. Jazz music plays hysterically, and people drift in a drunken state toward an eternal future...
Rather than being a stifling traditional architect, Ferris, who abstracted and depicted the ideal city that people dreamed of, was welcomed in New York in this era of consumerism and went on to work on a variety of projects.
His drawings are characterized by buildings that emerge illuminated by light against a soft, misty touch.
At times, Ferris's urban landscapes, which resemble the collective unconscious, even seem to contain a mythical quality, as he also digests the exoticism of ancient Oriental ruins.
A future city as a collective unconscious, filled with sentimentality that evokes many stories in the viewer. He continued to deliver oracles as a prophet in his slumber.
The cityscape shapes society and its people. I felt that the architecture that stands there must be aware of this in order to evoke emotions and inspire people.
However, after the Great Depression of 1929 and the New Deal of 1940, the people of New York, and indeed America, began to lose interest in skyscrapers, as if waking from a dream. Industrial architecture such as huge bridges, dams, and factories became popular, and Ferris's "oracle" became a thing of the past.
But people dream all the time, and the scenery of Ferris gradually began to be seen as a landscape in a world of stories.
Take Gotham City, the home of Batman. It seems only natural that a Hugh Ferris-esque streetscape would be chosen as the setting for his battle against sociopathic villains born of the city's woes.
It continues to influence pop culture, including movies and video games. The future that Ferriss envisioned never came to fruition, but its landscape continues to shine even brighter in our memories as a constant theme in our imaginary cities.
An eternal future that will never come. Infinite possibilities and countless stories stand still among the dimly lit skyscrapers, waiting for the next storyteller.