Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Power of Buildings, 1920-1950: A Master Draftsman's Record
    The Power of Buildings, 1920-1950: A Master Draftsman's Record
    The Power of Buildings, 1920-1950: A Master Draftsman's Record
    Ebook174 pages1 hour

    The Power of Buildings, 1920-1950: A Master Draftsman's Record

    By Hugh Ferriss

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Trained as an architect in the early twentieth century, Hugh Ferriss possessed a vision of form that surpassed the traditional blueprints of his peers—and it showed in his distinctively moody renderings. A master of light and shadow, he managed to capture the spirit of each building with a heightened sense of perspective and design. By the 1920s, he was well on his way to becoming America's greatest architectural draftsman. Ferriss' remarkable style, which influenced generations of builders, is highlighted in this illustrated journey through three decades of American architecture.
    Accompanied by illuminating text and captions, this collection of sixty of his extraordinary drawings includes: Rockefeller Center, a stunning symbol of modern Art Deco style; California's Shasta Dam, ranked as one of the great civil engineering feats of the world; the Perisphere and Trylon from New York's 1939 World's Fair; Taliesin-in-Arizona, Frank Lloyd Wright's breathtaking winter home; and Denver's Red Rocks Amphitheater, a dramatic structure that incorporates natural elements and rock formations. Plus, there are illustrations of the Empire State Building, the United Nations headquarters, airports, grain elevators, bomb shelters, and more. Architects, draftsmen, and designers of all ages will savor the wonder and imagination in this magnificent volume.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateMar 8, 2012
    ISBN9780486136189
    The Power of Buildings, 1920-1950: A Master Draftsman's Record

    Related to The Power of Buildings, 1920-1950

    Related ebooks

    Architecture For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Power of Buildings, 1920-1950

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Power of Buildings, 1920-1950 - Hugh Ferriss

      Buildings

      Introduction

      If you like architecture, and if you have seen the recent achievements around the eastern seaboard, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi Valley, around the Plains, the Rockies, and the Coast, you have already realized our nation’s power in buildings. Hoping to illustrate that power, I have selected from the larger structures designed since 1929—the present generation of buildings, so to speak —those that seem to me especially characteristic of this country at this time. Some of them were discovered during leisurely travels and drawn at the sites. Others, projects of international interest and perhaps bearing on world peace, I had occasion to delineate in drafting rooms where they were being designed.

      If the reader is unfamiliar with these recent developments in the building field, I would like to introduce a few of them to him, and to give him at least a visual impression of our architects’ typical, complex, and sometimes dramatic undertakings.

      Pictures should speak for themselves. And artists should be seen and not heard. However, this picture book has been put together mainly to tell a story that requires some words in the telling.

      From the beginning of civilization there have been men born with a desire to build. Architects by title, as by nature, they have shown, throughout, a dual intention: to shelter and to inspire. Architecture is thus on the creative side as well as the highly utilitarian, and appears to us, perhaps like all creation, as an evolutionary process: its history is a succession of gains and lapses, of successful and unsuccessful experiments; yet beneath the changing forms—mound, pyramid, ziggurat, temple, forum, capitol, cathedral—a generally forward drive can be so clearly discerned as to justify an enduring faith and a great expectation.

      Of this long saga, these pages are concerned with a mere fragment, some recent episodes that one witness saw at first hand. He belongs, however, to a generation that in a short time, three or four decades, has of necessity seen changes, in the materials, methods, and purposes for building, so striking and swift as to seem revolutionary.

      We saw the eclectic phase in which many traditional designers, of artistic leanings, were still involved shortly before 1929; we saw also, in striking reaction, the technological phase which preoccupied many functionalists, of scientific leanings, shortly thereafter. Concerning these two episodes—a lapse and an experiment—I shall have a few words to say: a brief retrospect of designs seen in the making and of the designers who made them.

      Most of these words, and all the drawings, will be concerned with a recent change in climate that is clearly noticeable in drafting rooms today. It has become plain that most designers, having survived eclecticism and functionalism, are now engaged in a widespread effort to reaffirm, in contemporary terms, architecture’s dateless integrity: the integration of scientific and artistic genius, of function and form, of technology and vision.

      This drive toward synthesis, in an age that lacks it, stands out in strong relief. In a world now so well versed in the techniques of destruction, the architects’ impulse to build gains a peculiar timeliness and valor.

      Retrospect

      Bias

      In the days of first impressions—when the bias, they say, is set—I received, as a birthday present, a picture of the Parthenon. I tacked it onto the wall and often thought about it. The building seemed to be built of stone. Its columns seemed designed to support a roof. It looked like some sort of temple. I learned in due time that all three impressions were true: the Parthenon was built of stone, its columns did support the roof, and it was a temple. So the material, method, and purpose for building all plainly showed in the visible form. It was an honest building. But there was more to it than that. Along with the truth and logic, there was an indefinable emotional appeal. The Parthenon was beautiful. The beauty was manly, noble, and serene.

      For one novice the word architecture then and there became a synonym and criterion for a certain kind of integrity: a union of truth and beauty, of scientific and artistic elements, as complete as the union of the elements hydrogen and oxygen in H2O.

      The bias that runs throughout this book was also set for the word architect. Plainly, the ancient master builders were able to face the technologies of their own day as a matter of course: they were able to provide, in a rational way, for the practical functioning of the structure. But apparently by some stroke of genius, by grace of whatever it is that makes some builders master builders, they were also able to dispose or simplify or enliven the bare facts so as to produce forms that the world, sooner or later, would call beautiful: buildings that would function for both body and spirit. Thus architect must mean a man of both sense and sensibility—rational scientist and inspired artist rolled into one! (I still know of no other vocation in which the dual role is so clearly mandatory.)

      However, the juvenile idealism was in for a jolt. One day, in my home town, I saw a building that had recently been awarded a Gold Medal for design. At first glance it bore a remarkable resemblance to my ideal, the Parthenon. It, too, seemed to be constructed of stone. Its stone columns seemed designed to support the roof. It looked like some sort of temple.

      It turned out to be constructed of steel. The stone columns supported nothing. It wasn’t any sort of temple; it was a bank. I felt as though someone in whom I had faith had proved to be a fraud! Did architecture also mean buildings that merely look sound? It is all very well for stage-sets to look like something without being it: in the theater illusion is the announced aim. But the gravity of architecture is such that if a design is not honest there is no use talking about its beauty. So, at least, it had seemed; but here was this disillusioning bank building which said, in effect, that architecture is merely a minor, eclectic art—a matter (as in designing, say, ladies’ costumes) of freely selecting some popular fashion or style to impose upon an otherwise simple and honest structure.

      A third building, standing not far from the bank, completed the schoolboy quandary. It was a tall structure, designed, I heard, by someone from Chicago named Sullivan. Behind a rather delicate envelope of brick, one could clearly visualize the interior steel columns which, with their girders, made up the real structure. Outwardly it looked like an office building and it was an office building. So, like

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1