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Ironically, Hugh Ferriss (1889-1962), the visionary architect who believed that skyscrapers were the product of a culture devoid of spirituality, is now perhaps best known for his drawings of skyscrapers. Ferriss was a talented draftsman who made a career for himself by rendering the designs of other prominent architects of the early twentieth century. His own ideas and designs were more utopian than practical; in his 1929 book Metropolis of Tomorrow, Ferriss wrote about and illustrated a future city of New York that was divided into discrete zones, all skyscrapers evenly spaced between shorter buildings to provide an open-air city plan. Though most of Ferriss's designs remained unrealized, he worked as a consultant for several architectural projects that did come to fruition in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, including Idlewild Airport and the United Nations Headquarters. Ferriss received numerous awards from the Architectural League of New York, and he also served as president of that organization, as well as the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Ferriss's drawings were published in numerous magazines, including Century, Harper's, and The Quill. In addition to his architectural pursuits, Ferriss illustrated playbill covers for the Greenwich Village Playhouse.
Ferriss’s 1939 letter to the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes offers insight into how Ferriss conceived of his original drawings. As a design artist for the New York World’s Fair, Ferriss drafted several images of the famous exposition, which, much in line with Ferriss’s own interests, offered idealized models of a future world and its potential for technological innovation.