On an intellectual level i know that early 20th century megacity concepts are deeply impractical and would cause triple the harm they purported to solve, but damn if the art doesn’t make me yearn to visit.
Hugh Harriss made some of my favorites.
It’s Hugh Ferriss, check out The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929). Some of his work is speculative, some of it is just artistic renderings of existing (or proposed) buildings for advertising purposes, some of it is educational, and a lot of it is New York. All of it is dope.
I love Hugh Ferriss cityscapes so much. I grew up with Batman: The Animated Series, and it’s responsible for a lot, and this whole vibe, the massive, monolithic, Art Deco cityscape, Hugh Ferriss is the epitome of it. Gotham, Metropolis, Rapture, New Capenna. Any fantasy dieselpunk art deco city you’ve ever seen. This guy, along with the original Metropolis, was one of the first.Â
I especially love that last image from the first post:
I have it saved to most of my computers so I can use it as a desktop occasionally. This tiny human figure standing back in awe of this cityscape view that absolutely dwarfs them, this mass of concrete and light that looks like a dawn beyond them.Â
And, yes, this is from an early 20th century dream of a future that would have been incredibly bad for us, but the imagery. This is the city as a mass, as an entity, as a pillar to the heavens, as a radiance, as a dawn. The solidity of it. These are cities as the epitome of humanity’s ability to say ‘I built this’. I made this mountain, and I made it radiant. I put this thing here and it is so solid that no wrath of any god could strike this babel down.
(They wouldn’t have needed to. We’d never have gotten them up, and if we had they’d have slowly killed us in and of themselves. But damn they look good)
I really love his stuff …
