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But we don't believe that he gives a toss for the office worker! For on a rising wave of enthusiasm he continues:

"Furthermore there will be the aeroplanes. The drawing suggests tower hangars in whose shelves they will—why not?--land neatly!"

He reins himself in at points but in Part Three (An Imaginary Metropolis) reveals very clearly the implications of his city aesthetic. His tidy-mindedness and authoritarian impulses produce a city that is zoned. "The city is divided into a Business zone, an Art zone and a Science zone...."

But of course compared to these visions, real cities are infinitely more ad hoc, more diffuse; Ferriss was unhappy about this. "Do we not traverse, in our daily walks, districts which are stupid and miscellaneous rather than logical and serene—and move, day long, through an absence of viewpoint, vista, axis, relation or plan?"

Yes indeed; he is describing here the sort of randomness that was enjoyed so much by Estes. Looking again at Ferriss' pictures they look quite enviable; but the uniformity of urban design that appealed to Ferris and to Garnier for that matter was a uniformity that could only have been implemented by the politics of Speer or Ceaucescu. The democratic city is NY as it is, not "NY as it 'will'be" in the visions of such as Ferriss. The totalitarian look is very seductive; but real cities, the cities we most want to live in, are the ones that William Morris or Ebenezer Howard or Garnier or Mumford or le Corbusier want to pull down.

(Ferriss' drawings seem to provide a link between two films. perhaps the two major films of predictive cities: Metropolis (1927) and Bladerunner (1982). Clearly Ferriss work was inspired by the first and very specifically inspired the second: his particular interest in what he calls "the ancient Assyrian ziggurat" appears in his engravings and in the epic opening shots of Bladerunner.

Quite this audacity was never reached, even in New York. Where the opportunity arose they never quite happened. Gaudi's project for a stalagmite like Grand Hotel (1908) is but one project that didn't get built.

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