Charcoal drawings and essays by the architectural renderer Hugh Ferriss, which showed architects how the 1916 zoning envelope could be carved into the stepped masses of the setback skyscraper.
In 1922, working with the architect Harvey Wiley Corbett, Ferriss drew a famous sequence of four stages: first the maximum mass the 1916 law allowed on a block, a great truncated pyramid; then that mass cut into steps so that floors could be lit; then the steps adjusted to practical floor plates; and finally a finished building with a tower. The drawings made the law look like a sculptor’s block rather than a restriction.
The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929) collects these studies with Ferriss’s visions of a future city of widely spaced setback towers joined by elevated roads. It shaped the image of the Art Deco skyscraper just as the Chrysler, the Chanin and the Empire State buildings were being designed.
The book, part by part
I The four stages
From the legal envelope to the finished tower.