The Metropolis of Tomorrow (Dover Architecture)

Great book this is the book Mr. Ferris is most known for. A great architect, artist and visionary.This book serves as a guiding example of black and white drawing using graphite. Amazing perspective - in both literal and non-literal sense. This book was a recommendation in my undergrad Intro to Perspective drawing class.

A fascinating look at a future city which was written in the Art Deco era. First published in 1929, the book show what did and didn't actually happen in the future. A very enjoyable book.

It is difficult, at best, to comprehend the fascination with the future that gripped Western society following the Great War. Hugh Ferriss has left us this superlative work depicting what he fervently expected in the city of our time. The fact that our cities do not remotely resemble his vision is interesting. Even more interesting is the intricate explanation that he provided for his conclusions.Today few, if any, people have much concern with the impending utopia that industry and technology will create for our children and grandchildren. In actual fact, we are in the midst of mind-boggling technological innovation that is impacting our lives at every conceivable level, both for the better and for the worse. Ferriss would be amazed and completely befuddled.This book is both an excellent showcase for the drawing skills of Ferriss and for the culture of the Twentieth-Century Future.

Hugh Ferriss was an architectural renderer whose style and vision evoke memories of what we now call the gothic and art deco periods of American architecture. The book also deals with some of the urban problems that building on such a large scale could bring about. The drawings have a dream-like quality to them that stuck in my mind when I first saw them many years ago. The book is a valuable addition to my library.

LOVE this book, love Hugh Ferriss. The drawings are moody and lofty, visions of a majestic yet unsettling future. My only complaint is that the book itself is not as handsome as I had hoped. Next time I'll spring for the first edition.

I got the paper book published by Forgotten Books. It's a ver poor copy. The Metropolis of Tomorrow by Hugh Ferriss is an architectural book full of drawings of skyscrapers in the Art Deco style. Ferris' sketches (which I saw in another source) are dark, dramatic, very film noir images. They convey their meaning with the full range of light to dark greys. The reproductions in this book do not convey any of that subtlety. At best, you see totally black and totally white shapes. Some photographs look like the fifteenth xerox of an image. The text is not reproduced well, either. It is small, jumbled and hard to read. The entire book seems to have been downloaded from Google books and printed. Not happy with it and can't recommend it, especially since it is an art book: there is no art to the reproduction here.

Incredible. Dover is an amazing publisher of very inexpensive items. This is a hard to find collection of images and text gathered in one book. So happy with this purchase. :D

"The Metropolis of Tomorrow by Hugh Ferris a great example of how any field, taking upon it a vision of the future, ultimately tries to create a new system of benign government. Ferris was an architect who, in 1929, published a series of sketches about what cities could and should look like. Plainly stating that architecture affects people's actions at the subconcious level, he creates an environment within which people might just act better.In spirit this is so much like Thomas More's Utopia or Edward Bellamy's Looking backward that it's freaky.Ferriss's city is enourmous. The base of its largest buildings take up eight blocks. They're so big and specially purposed that he says the word "building" no longer fits--they should be called "centers." There's a business, government, art and science center. Each building is its own city with banks, gyms, shops, restaurants.In the city of the future, religions act in harmony. They're housed in a triple building. One is for the executive offices, the next for "aspirational activities" and the third, and the highest, is for charities.The description of the Science Zone is a poem:"Buildings like crystals.Walls of translucent glass.Sheer glass blocks sheathing a steel grill.No Gothic branch: no Acanthus leaf: no recollection of the plant world.A mineral kingdom.Gleaming stalagmites.Forms as cold as ice.Mathematics.Night in the Science Zone."And yet for all the artificiality of it -- the buildings are concrete and the layout is geometric -- Ferris embeds organic aspects. Between the huge centers, buildings climb no more than six stories and they ascend insize towards the centers like "foothills." The roofs are covered in two feet of soil so trees can grow.Ferris concludes his work: "Are we to imagine that this city is populated by human beings who value emotion and mind equally with the senses, and have therefore disposed their art, science and business centers in such a way that all three would participate equally in the government of the city?"Ferris did much to influence our ideas about what the city of tomorrow should look like. But as new as his ideas were, it's clear that they're compelling for how they embody our ancient ideals, hopes and fears.