Gotham: The City of Babel
Posted by John Brownlee
The city of the future was not always synonymous with shimmering pods set upon stilts: there was a time when architecture looked less to sci-fi to predict tomorrow’s cityscapes and more to the Tower of Babel. This is the look of Gotham: Biblical enormity, architecture that sets up the ideas of mankind — our dreams, our hopes, our designs — as the new gods, so much larger than our flesh that the individual is something smaller and less potent than an insect. A city of holy dread.
On the forefront of this very retro-futuristic city design was Hugh Fenriss, an architectural draftsman who made atmospheric chiaroscuros of the awesome cities he composed in his head. Clearly, his work was a major inspiration to the look of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Read more about him here or check out this Flickr gallery for over 300 of his designs. We all live, in small part, in his world.
Hugh Fenriss [Flickr] : Quiddity : Feuilleton
Categories: 1920s, Metropolis, Design, Architecture, Retrofuturism, Religion
Posted at 10:04 am on January 2, 2008
2 Comments -
[…] -FD research: Hugh Ferriss photoset […]
Pingback by first linkdump of ‘08. « supervillain — January 3, 2008 @ 1:59 am
That’s actually Hugh Ferriss - “Hugh Fenriss”, I think, would be an architectural draftsman who was also a mythological wolf fated to fall under Thor’s hammer at Ragnarok.
Ferriss was an influential draftsman whose building concepts were never, ever, built. There’s some great stuff in his “Metropolis of Tommorrow” and “Power in Buildings”, both available in reprint. My copy of “The Metropolis of Tomorrow” is an older replica reprint in hardcover, which would be worth looking for.
Comment by Bradley W. Schenck — January 3, 2008 @ 3:44 pm