Designed while studying architecture in New York, the Ferriss Collection was born shortly after discovering an original catalogue from Hugh Ferriss: Metropolis, shown by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1986.

Hugh Ferriss is known for his illustrations of America’s architectural landmarks, from the Empire State Building to the Chicago Tribune Tower. Working alongside the most ambitious architects of his time, he was uniquely positioned to not only see the future but also help shape it.

A particularly well known series of drawings described the maximum permitted bulk of any given building under the New York City zoning laws. These diagrams proved influential in the work of his contemporaries and his own thinking on the future of the city.

In 1929, Ferriss published Metropolis of Tomorrow presenting his vision for an urban utupia: a city of towering monuments gathered into three primary centres; business, science and the arts.

BUILDINGS like crystals.
Walls of translucent glass.
Sheer glass blocks sheathing a steel grill.
No Gothic branch: no Acanthus leaf: no recollection of the plant world.
A mineral kingdom.
Gleaming stalagmites.
Forms as cold as ice.
Mathematics.
Night in the Science Zone.*

The Ferriss Collection embraces the sculptural spirit of Ferriss’ world, and is a study of mass, form and proportion. Each ring has been hand-carved to perfectly combine an Art Deco elegance with a contemporary minimalism.

The original molds were made in the heart of New York’s Diamond District - home to the city’s dealers, manufacturers, and an average daily trade of $400 million.

Available in both sterling silver and bronze, the pieces have a matte finish to reflect the twilight glow of a Hugh Ferriss work and are designed to endure everyday wear.

These rings aren’t afraid to stand alone or be paired with diamonds. They are rings for a New Yorker.

Hugh Ferriss (1889–1962) was the master draftsman of the American metropolis, real and ideal. As one of the nation’s leading architectural delineators, he was hired to render hundreds of new buildings and projects in cities across the country, while as a visionary architect and author of The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929), he conceived an ideal city of majestic towers that seemed to embody the American dream of progress and prosperity. One of the many inspired reviewers of Metropolis hailed Ferriss as a “poet among architects, an artist who can translate in terms of steel, the soaring aspirations of men.”*

Ferriss’ expressive charcoal drawings mixed poetry and power in a twentieth-century version of the Sublime—he was awed not by the overwhelming forces of nature, but by the constructive energy of man. Exaggerating the monumental qualities of structures and suppressing ornament and detail, he reduced buildings to the profound power of their simple mass. His rich chiaroscuro renderings veiled the city in a mist of romance. In daylight scenes, he dissolved buildings in atmospheric effects, muting the dissonance of urban life, and for night visions, he drew dark and silent silhouettes against jazz lights.

Ferriss defined the art of rendering—which he contrasted to the mechanical act of drafting—as “an attempt to tell the Truth about a Building.” His idea of truth was not a literal visual veracity, but an interpretation of the architectural significance of a structure. “Buildings,” he asserted, “possess an individual existence, varying—now dynamic, now serene—but vital, as all else in the universe.” Like a portraitist he sought to reveal “the emotional tone, the particular mood” of his subject, and like any great artist he imprinted his own personality on every drawing.

“The underlying truth of a building,” wrote Ferriss, “is that it is a Mass in Space.” In his characteristic rendering style, Ferriss conceptualized the building as a simple, sculptural mass, first shading planes. Then, working as a sculptor carving from a solid block, he created details by lightening areas with an eraser or paper stump. This method seems to have evolved from his important drawings of the “zoning envelope” of 1922, developed in collaboration with architect Henry Wiley Corbett. Designed to study the limitations imposed by the 1916 New York zoning law on the maximum bulk of a building, these striking images impressed contemporaries with the beauty of the undisguised setback mass and significantly influenced the formal aesthetic of Art Deco skyscrapers of the 1920s.

Born and raised in St. Louis, Ferriss received a degree in architecture from Washington State University in 1911. The following year he moved to New York and worked as a draftsman in the large office of Case Gilbert until 1915, when he launched his long-dreamed-of career as a freelance delineator. Most of his early commissions were for magazine illustrations and advertisements, but by the early 1920s, perspective drawings commissioned by architectural firms became his principal work. In 1922 he began to collaborate with progressive architects such as Corbett and Raymond Hood and to illustrate their visionary proposals. These commissions informed and inspired his own contemporary theorizing, and in April 1925 he mounted an exhibition of his drawings of the future city at the Anderson Galleries in New York.

In 1929, Ferriss published his masterpiece, The Metropolis of Tomorrow. In it, he collected many of his finest drawings of the twenties, presenting new work only in the final section. Organized as a three-part thesis, the book examined contemporary design and projected trends, then proposed a vision of urban utopia. Ferriss illustrated an urban landscape of monumental setback centers, widely separated and hierarchically positioned in a geometric and symbolic city plan. In his text he charged that the contemporary city suffered from a total lack of planning and warned that architects must plan to preserve human values in the face of inexorable urban growth. Although it was published just after the Wall Street crash, Metropolis inspired ecstatic reviews and Ferriss was extolled as America’s principal prophet of the urban future.

The Depression disillusioned Ferriss about the capitalist city and precipitated many changes in American architecture generally. In this, the second phase of his career, his practice and stature in the architectural establishment grew steadily. He often served as official delineator and design consultant on large projects, such as the 1939 New York World’s Fair and the United Nations Headquarters. In 1940, funded by a grant from the Architectural League of New York, he traveled across the country, sketching the most outstanding structures erected since 1929. He was attracted to factories, research centers, highways and bridges—and especially to the great new hydroelectric dams of the West. Many of these drawings were exhibited in a one-artist show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1942 and were later collected in Ferriss; second book, Power in Buildings (1953).

Although trained as an architect, Ferriss elected to draw rather than to build—yet he nevertheless perceived his role as a forgiver and theorist. If today his grandiose vision of urban utopia contradicts the contemporary idea of a livable city, his images remain inspiring for their timeless beauty and humanist intent. They document the dreams of a man who believed that the ambition to rebuild the American metropolis for the benefit of all its citizens was an achievable goal.

Carol Willis
Guest Curator, Metropolis (1986)
Whitney Museum of Art at the Equitable Center

*All quotations from Hugh Ferriss’ writings are taken from Carol Willis, “Drawing Towards Metropolis,” in The Metropolis of Tomorrow, reprint (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 1986.)

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