Hugh Ferriss – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

Blog this: tits out for the future

left: tits t-shirt by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren.
right: the Hipp Chronoscope via io9.

A new year brings new blogs which is perhaps just as well seeing as the old year drew a line under some regular reads.

The Look, “Adventures in pop and rock fashion”, began posting a couple of weeks ago, spinning off from Paul Gorman’s book of the same name. Pieces there which immediately catch my eye are a skate through Billy Bowers’ outrageous clothing designs and a nice potted-history of the “tits tee”. I’d not realised before that the history of this latter creation goes back beyond punk to the early Seventies, another example of the evolution from post-psychedelic freakery to punk being a process of gradual elision, not the clean break that lazy commentary often suggests.

Also arriving (and noted everywhere by now) is io9, a new addition to the Gawker network, which looks at sf-related culture. I’ve already had a traffic spike from there after they linked to my Hugh Ferriss post and it’s good to see that Bldg Blog‘s Geoff Manaugh is among their contributors.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ave Atque Vale!

Hugh Ferriss and The Metropolis of Tomorrow

Philosophy from The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929).

I’ve procrastinated for an entire year over the idea of writing something about Hugh Ferriss and now this marvellous Flickr set has forced my hand. Ferriss (1889–1962) was a highly-regarded architectural renderer in the Twenties and Thirties, chiefly employed creating large drawings to show the clients of architects how their buildings would look when completed. But he was also an architectural theorist and his 1929 book, The Metropolis of Tomorrow, which lays out his ideas for cities of the future, was a major influence on the work I produced for the Lord Horror comics during the 1990s. Ferriss’s book appeared two years after Fritz Lang’s Metropolis but bears little resemblance to Lang’s simplistic tale, despite superficial similarities. Rather than a science fiction warning, The Metropolis of Tomorrow was a serious proposal for the creation of Art Deco-styled megacities.

Lord Horror: Hard Core Horror #5 (1990).

Continue reading “Hugh Ferriss and The Metropolis of Tomorrow”

Lenin Rising

More monumental relics from the former Soviet Union. In March last year I posted some pictures from a film by Takehiko Nagakura who used CGI to show how St Petersburg would look if Vladimir Tatlin’s enormous Monument to the Third International had been built. Architectural megalomania didn’t abate with the collapse of that project and Stalin had his own plans for a number of vast buildings and monuments, including this colossal statue (or is it a building?) of Lenin intended to tower over Moscow.

These pictures come courtesy of Englishrussia.com. You can also see there a collection of (uncredited) pictures like the one above which follow Nagakura’s example and show how the Moscow of today would look had this structure been built. There’s also this strangely antique design for another vast Lenin memorial, which looks like Hugh Ferriss by way of ancient Egypt, and dizzying pictures from the top of the very large (62m tall) and very real ‘Mother Motherland’ monument in Kiev.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dead Monuments
• Enormous structures II: Tatlin’s Tower