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Given the fact that we are now in the third millenium it is interesting that we have had few predictions of the same perky audacity of these. One of the most thrilling, though dark visions was that of New York in the year 1999 published in the New York World Dec 31st 1900. It shows a prediction for Manhattan which was really an extrapolation from the architectural tendencies already at work there. It shows an immense heaping up of hyper-babylonian ziggurats rendered in nightmarish detail. During the century there was a proliferation of megalomaniac visions that are absolutely thrilling.

Pictures of this can be found in Harry M. Petit's The Cosmopolis of the Future (1908) or the visions of Harvey Wiley Corbett from 1923: the usual images: stacked up buildings, skyhigh overpasses, moth-light aircraft negotiating the summits of skyscapers.

The classic of this dark but not dystopian vision is the volume of drawings done by Hugh Ferris in 1929: The Metropolis of Tomorrow. This book is somewhat vague in its declared aims; it begins with a review of the major skyscrapers at the date of publication. There are some serious considerations of the future of architecture and the future for young architects; but its vagueness becomes (as it proceeds) downright contradictory.

"To the draughtsman who approaches his subject from a pictorial point of view, this (the race for altitude) presents fascinating possibilities. One can easily fancy himself perched up somewhere on the hundredth floor; one looks down, at a dizzy angle, along the flanks of adjoining precipices; one is tempted to imagine the scene at night, with geometrical lights flaring in the abyss."

Ferriss repeatedly affects anxiety about the tendencies of the vertical city; he talks of his own drawings as being far from an inspiration, that they may serve rather as a warning. "it may look like this if nothing is done about it."

But we are not convinced; he is fascinated, as I am, at the vision he has evoked. As the book progresses he abandons these affected qualms with the utmost ease. Check out the excitement here!:

"One could drive at will across the facades of buildings at the fifth, tenth, fifteenth or twentieth storey. Automobiles below one, automobiles above one. A paradise perhaps for the automobile manufacturer!" (he remembers to say in time)… But for the office worker..."

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