Modern Babylon: Ziggurat Skyscrapers and Hugh Ferriss' Retrofuturism

Summary

Ferriss’ distinction — between mere regurgitation, on the one hand, and a deeper appreciation of the eternal power of certain forms and practices, on the other — was also made by architects who agreed that there might be lessons to be drawn from the approaches of medieval and ancient civilizations. The Swiss modernist Le Corbusier, perhaps the most famous prophet of planned future cities, cited the Parthenon as the apogee of an architecture of basic geometric forms, “pure creation of the mind”, evoking “emotion of a superior, mathematical order” and embodying a spirit of “imagination and cold reason”. He detected an analogous spirit at work in the design of the telephone, the airplane, and the automobile. Louis Sullivan agreed. In the same article in which he argued for form to follow function, Sullivan cited rare periods when architecture was a “living art”, which had produced “the Greek temple, the Gothic cathedral, the medieval fortress” — a grouping he argued was now being joined by “the tall office building”. In all of these examples, radical designs enabled by new technologies were nonetheless produced by the same animating spirit, the same eternal dicta, as the enduringly powerful forms of the past.