Hugh Ferriss is best known as the illustrator of New York’s skyscrapers. He’s also the spiritual father of Lebbeus Woods, who I previously wrote about; both were visionary architect-artists who drew other people’s buildings then went on to create their own imaginary worlds.
Ferriss trained as an architect – but according to Daniel Okrent, author of “Great Fortune”, he built little or nothing of his own. Instead, he was employed by large commercial practices in New York to create presentation drawings. Soon, Ferriss became a professional renderer and in parallel he developed as an architectural theorist – also, and probably not coincidentally, Lebbeus Woods’ career path.
The 1929 book, The “Metropolis of Tomorrow”, lays out Hugh Ferriss’s ideas for Art Deco mega-cities of the future. I also have a copy of “Power in Building” acquired from Powell’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon … when it turned out that William Stout’s in San Francisco only had a modern facsimile rather than the original edition. The power of the internet …
Ferriss used dramatic, almost violent perspective, which combined dynamic angles with strong light and shadow. His renderings of the “Zoning Law”-era skyscrapers which were built during the period between the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gilded Age, through the Great Depression, to the start of World War Two made him famous. 
“Metropolis of Tomorrow” grew from Hugh Ferriss’s experience illustrating the Chicago Tribune Tower, Rockefeller Centre, Empire State and Chrysler Buildings. He also portrayed pre-war proposals for the United Nations headquarters, then the Perisphere and Trylon from the New York 1939 World's Fair. Further afield he drew Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West in Arizona, as well as the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Denver.
When war intervened after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, Ferriss drew the process of aircraft production at Lockheed’s aircraft factory, bomb shelters, and the construction of the Shasta Dam in California – but I recently came across his wartime drawings for the United States Pipe & Foundry Co. which I hadn’t seen before.
Ferris’s reputation rests on those two books “Metropolis of Tomorrow” and “Power in Building” plus a few exhibitions such as the 1986 show at the Whitney Museum in New York … but the pipe foundry drawings don’t appear to feature in any of them, which is a shame, because they show another complementary facet of his work.
These adverts are industrial propaganda, and their imagery is powerful because Ferriss’s style is ideally suited to his subject. Compared to the social realism of other wartime adverts – which seem strangely Soviet in their portrayal of the triumph of organised labour – Ferriss captures the scale, drama and theatricality of the pipe mill and iron foundry. He hints at the Fordist approach of mass production, with huge production halls and endless rows of components awaiting shipment.
I guess this irony was lost on his patrons: while industry in America became more and more mechanistic and increasingly automated, it relied upon charcoal and crayon renderings made by a highly individual hand. The Adverts for Tomorrow were anything but Fordist in execution.
