Evidently Ferriss never designed a single noteworthy building, but after his death a colleague said “he influenced my generation of architects more than any other man.” With The Metropolis of Tomorrow it’s easy to see why. It’s beautiful with idealistic and poetically expressed ideas about the then current state of urban architecture (including the only recently enacted zoning laws) and a fond hope that architects to come would put concept, human experience, and emotional response before mere capitalistic considerations.

The book is broken up into three sections titled, Cities of Today, Projected Trends, and An Imaginary Metropolis. In choosing which images to post I’ve decided to leave aside the first chapter with its renderings of real buildings of the period, and focus instead on a few examples from the last two chapters, all of which were imagined by Ferriss to illustrate the key concepts of his text.

Hope you enjoy.

For a few more bits on Ferris see the following: 

Place, Power, and the Human Being.

Tangible Futures example: Hugh Ferriss’s delineations.

High Priest of the New York Skyscraper Sex Cult.

Lastly The ASAI happens to offer an annual award for the best architectural illustrators which is named for Ferris. See here for past winners.

The post-modern ability the culture at large has adopted which has us giggling over abuses of power, sniggering at lies, whooping at war, and chortling at all the terrifying evidence of a country coming apart at the seems strikes me as irresponsible somehow. It’s not that the shows ought not to be pointing out the absurdities, or that we ought not to be grabbing some laughter wherever we can find it, but when the “actual” press has stopped doing its job and the only dissenting voices with heavy airtime are those of comedy shows… well, it’s scary.

While we all sit around laughing things off, a list of offenses, which in ages past might have provoked a revolution among the populous, scrolls away to the horizon, unchecked. Where is the real outrage? Why aren’t we up in arms? Why is this government still in power? What is wrong with us?

If you think this is a maudlin observation, maybe you’re right, but if so today’s state of affairs still seems to beg the question: when did public opinion become so impotent as to be very nearly meaningless? Who among us want to be where we are or headed where we are headed? Who thinks endless conflict and death and debt and corruption are acceptable? Who’s happy?

Sure the world is complex, there are no easy answers, but somehow, after 5 years, laughing at those in power no longer feels like the appropriate reaction. Unless there are pitchforks involved.

Course, I’ve never, ever, attended a protest, let alone been on the inside of an angry mob, so what the hell do I know? Anyone have an opinion?

On the streets the shortest path to coin was all. Here, among the beggars, he could be welcomed rather than tolerated, a violinist rather than a fiddler. The girls and the children would enjoy it, though the men would need more drink, drink they didn’t have, to slacken their scowls. Music alone wasn’t nearly enough to salve their problems. The man in the top-hat had only just recently found himself among their number. He clung to that hat the way a tick clung to a mongrel’s skin, as though a few inches of good quality felt were all that stood between him and final heartbreak. Today the old musician would play for him. He’d play a bit from “The Beggar’s Opera,” a piece he’d learned while in England all those years ago. Yes, today he’d play for the man in the top hat but he’d sing for himself-

Facts: The Old Musician

From a 1984 edition of the hardcover devoted to the collections of The National Gallery in Washington-

“The principal pleasure to be gained from Manet comes from the beauty of his brushwork. He mixed on his palette the exact tone he needed and with swift and certain dexterity delineated on the canvas each area of light and shadow. In The Old Musician this virtuosity of handling can be seen most clearly in the trenchant strokes that define the folds in the shirt and trousers of the boy with the straw hat, or in the more caressing feather touch on the shawl of the girl holding the baby.

Manet’s method of direct painting caused him to suppress the transitional tones of modeling which particularly suggest volume. Like Velazquez, who was also a master of brushwork, he chose an illumination which would flatten form as much as possible. Thus the light falls directly on the figures from behind the artist’s head, and the shadows are reduced to a minimum. Through this arbitrary elimination of shadow Manet was able to state local color more freely. He attained, especially in such early works as The Old Musician, the most subtle harmonies of yellowish white and faded blue, here contrasted with warm browns and blacks and soft grays. This color scheme was as far as possible from the high intensities and broken colors of the Impressionists, which he adopted at the end of his life.

For Manet, in spite of a strong instinct for the traditional, became a leader of the Impressionists’ revolt. The public attacked his pictures, as they attacked the other Impressionists, but less because of his method of painting than because of a certain outre quality in his subject matter. In The Old Musician, for instance, what is the meaning of the brooding octogenarian on the extreme right, who is bisected so unconventionally by the frame? Perhaps he was put there simply to balance the composition, for Theodore Duret, who knew Manet well, said he painted this troupe of beggars merely because it pleased him to preserve a record of them and for no other reason. And yet one senses a significance which just escapes, a hidden meaning which is baffling. In Manet’s pictures these recurrent and tantalizing affectations infuriated his contemporaries and were in part the reason he never attained the popular admiration which he so desperately desired.”

More to come…

Recently something dawned on me. I came out of my office and turned south toward the N/R station. I happened to look up and saw the emptiness which terminated the pinpoint of a horizon, where, as it so happens, the towers used to be. It struck me, looking up casually and unthinking, that what I really wanted to see were those towers. It wasn’t a sad moment, I didn’t crash knee-down on the pavement and (damn them!) launch into a Heston-worthy soliloquy. I simply looked up and realized for the first time, that long after all the sadness and shock and directionless anger, after the promises and grand plans and presentations that what I would most fondly like to see were those two towers again. My opinion suddenly formed solidly on what should be       built on that ground.

A few months ago I had to go down to the court building to throw my name into the jury-duty hat, and afterward walking by the site of “ground zero” I was dismayed to see what, after nearly 5 years, all the glitzy competitions, heated debate, and ponderously heavy rhetoric had wrought… exactly nothing. “Ground zero,” suddenly a doubly fitting name, was ground that contained zero. It was a huge fucking hole in the ground; that’s it. I don’t know whether those of you living outside of the Tri-State area realize that. With all that has been said and all that has been done in the reverent name of 9/11, the actual site, the “holy ground” which evidently just radiates with meaning and power, is still, 5 years later, a dirt hole. It seems that in “this post 9/11 world” symbolism and rhetoric are all that can be built-up, with passionate gusto, tall and strong. 

When I say what I really want to see when looking south are those towers I mean it literally. You know what I don’t really want to see? A hideous fucking monstrosity, covered in prisms, couched in forgettable hackneyed concept, birthed from the piteous wombs of politics, greed, and compromise.

Message to George Pataki- You and your “Legacy” can suck cock. I can only take heart that your utter failure will impede your using our tragedy to bolster a presidential bid (like a certain Mayor, who everyone seems to forget was widely despised by those he governed before events allowed him to don the hero-mask… oh wait… it’s 2006… that’s a Presidential pedigree today isn’t it?)

Message to Larry A. Silverstein- Kill yourself. Seriously. You are a Scumbag. I’d rather tongue-kiss a lipless leper crack-addict than even look at you. 

Message to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation- Fire yourselves.

Message to George W. Bush, his cabinet members, and the sycophantic House and Senate- Get the term “9/11” out of your filthy fucking mouths. I don’t want to hear another tangential argument given weight by your use of September 11th as ballast until the “ground zero” of those events is afforded the same weight, in physical reality, as it is in your “stirring” words.

You know that primary construction on the original Twin Towers only took about 5 years? That means that if our leaders were not so full-of-shit, if our business-men were not so totally devoid of social conscience, and our citizens were not so listless, that we New Yorkers could look south and see, if not this September then one very soon, two reassuringly familiar (albeit structurally improved) towers rising to fill the empty spaces? How “right” would that feel? As things stand symbolism is threatening to usurp reality completely. If the incompetence continues much longer the symbol itself might be threatened with transformation. Anyone who says “Think of 9-11” will be saying “Think of how utterly full-of-shit we are.”

This is another photograph I took years ago. For some reason this image of a classic (Milton Glaser designed) “I heart N Y” coffee cup substituted with the word “V O I D” had a vitality and meaning to me. I made the cup and shot a whole role of it. I think I even had a t-shirt. Today, if I’m being honest, I have no idea what it meant to me exactly, or why it resonated. But again, as with the “towers in heaven” image, it seems to have found a new relevance, resonating for more obvious reasons. It’s an accidental protest image I suppose and I would like to offer it to you.

If anyone out there finds themselves similarly dismayed and upset by the void which still occupies what is ostensibly one of our countries most important sites, one which seems to symbolically initial all manner of political blank-check, then take it and use it.

Here is another:

Fuck it. What else is there for me to say? I’m tired.

Text Reads:

I bought this at Chelsea Fleamarkets for twenty-five cents. I can’t help but wonder that if maybe Karen had scanned it into her computer and applied a decent black border around, perhaps I would suddenly consider it art. Images like these are ubiquitous in Art; we all like to think that we are somehow profound because we appreciate images such as this one. We look at this photograph and we think, “That’s someone’s great grandmother” and we yearn for the identities of these people. And we yearn for our own identities as well, because we have no sense of family in the way that our grandparents do. And so we yell everyone that it has aesthetic value because we don’t even know who we are, and then we blame them for not understanding our Art. We subject the entire world to our idiosyncratic insecurities and then we think we are somehow deeper when they don’t get it.

“The sweetness of sorrow and love. To be smiled at by her in the car. That was the most beautiful thing of all. Always the longing to die & yet keeping oneself alive; this alone is love.” -Kafka.

Admission:
In April I bought 8 colored pencils and 5 different pads. They were beautiful things. The possibilities inherent in their eventual interaction were exciting. I imagined them as they’d look here on this screen. I imagined the birth of pixels rather than their simple relocation. I imagined the characters of A Voyage to Arcturis with their many eyes and foreign limbs rendered and neatly titled. I imagined my hand moving in sweeping arcs and careful angles. I imagined a flow which I’d call freedom. The pencils and pads are beautiful things still, dusty things in the museum of my desk.

What if I wrote? Wrote like a machine without a grammar-module or spell-check? Wrote like the eyes of a man lost in a jungle? What if I wrote hard and wild and whistled into the necks of empty bottles in the nighttime? Would you be gratified? What if I cast it all aside and hunted the head of my potential’s long shadow? Isn’t that what you do already? Can anything slow the relentless narrowing down of possibility into reality? No.

Admission:
I’ve forgotten how to write. What you see before you is what you see everywhere-compromise. It’s the road paved with good intention. It’s an anagen hair hiding its precious root-tip. It’s about as funny and beloved as a woman’s laugh lines. It’s all excuses. It’s the personal failure which passes for public accomplishment. You think I kid but I do not. No creator ever hungered to be a curator instead.

People enjoy it. So what? I brush up against thousands of people every day on the subway, in the elevator, on the sidewalk, in the hallways, at the bank and the deli; They file past my desk and window in an endless shambling stream. Their children shit themselves and scream and want; their dogs walk on the left and they walk on the right, taught leashes strung between like tripwires. “People enjoy it?” Yes. What the fuck do I care what they enjoy? Is it my job to tickle their asses with a delightful little feather? I don’t like them much, not sure I ever have. “Hope you enjoy.” How many times have you written that? Weak moments, punch-lines, every one.

Admission:
All is not what it seems. It’s less than it seems, and perhaps even less than that.

What if I called a spade a spade? Do you destroy a delusion by naming it as such? What if I called it what it was, self-absorption, and rather than prostrating myself and pretending at remorse I embraced it as my birthright in our culture? What if I wrapped myself in my own weaknesses? What if I split apart all syntax, ignored all context, and defied all expectation? What if I broke the contract and burst the bounds and spit in the eye of every passerby? That wouldn’t be like you. Exactly! And if “it” is me then to change it… But why would you want to change it?

Admission:
Because eventually the repetitive act of rooting out links and following them to their connected pretty pictures makes you want to do nothing so much as vomit.

What if I wrote a self-indulgent, rambling prose-poem, and posted it accompanied by meaningless scribbles? Would the result still be The Nonist? I don’t know. And does it matter?

Six Significant Landscapes

I
An old man sits
In the shadow of a pine tree
In China.
He sees larkspur,
Blue and white,
At the edge of the shadow,
Move in the wind.
His beard moves in the wind.
The pine tree moves in the wind.
Thus water flows
Over weeds.

II
The night is of the colour
Of a woman’s arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.

III
I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.

IV
When my dream was near the moon,
The white folds of its gown
Filled with yellow light.
The soles of its feet
Grew red.
Its hair filled
With certain blue crystallizations
From stars,
Not far off.

V
Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
Nor the chisels of the long streets,
Nor the mallets of the domes
And high towers,
Can carve
What one star can carve,
Shining through the grape-leaves.

VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses—
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon—
Rationalists would wear sombreros.




Poem Written at Morning

A sunny day’s complete Poussiniana
Divide it from itself. It is this or that
And it is not.
By metaphor you paint
A thing. Thus, the pineapple was a leather fruit,
A fruit for pewter, thorned and palmed and blue,
To be served by men of ice.
The senses paint
By metaphor. The juice was fragranter
Than wettest cinnamon. It was cribled pears
Dripping a morning sap.
The truth must be
That you do not see, you experience, you feel,
That the buxom eye brings merely its element
To the total thing, a shapeless giant forced
Upward.
Green were the curls upon that head.




Theory

I am what is around me.

Women understand this.
One is not duchess
A hundred yards from a carriage.

These, then are portraits:
A black vestibule;
A high bed sheltered by curtains.

These are merely instances.




Negation

Hi! The creator too is blind,
Struggling toward his harmonious whole,
Rejecting intermediate parts,
Horrors and falsities and wrongs;
Incapable master of all force,
Too vague idealist, overwhelmed
By an afflatus that persists.
For this, then, we endure brief lives,
The evanescent symmetries
From that meticulous potter’s thumb.




Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.




Gray Room

Although you sit in a room that is gray,
Except for the silver
Of the straw-paper,
And pick
At your pale white gown;
Or lift one of the green beads
Of your necklace,
To let it fall;
Or gaze at your green fan
Printed with the red branches of a red willow;
Or, with one finger,
Move the leaf in the bowl—
The leaf that has fallen from the branches of the forsythia
Beside you…
What is all this?
I know how furiously your heart is beating.




Gubbinal

That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.




All by Wallace Stevens.

The photographs (and a couple of the quotes) were all taken from the book, Solomon D. Butcher. Photographing the American Dream put out by the University of Nebraska Press in 1985.

Notes on the images: Very few of butchers own prints survive so the images here are reprinted from his negatives. in that he often cropped his shots drastically there is no way of knowing what his intended compositions really were.

For a bit more more on Butcher, his photographs, and the homesteader life in general see the following:

Prairie Settlement, the