The Exposed City

Mapping the Urban Invisibles

Nadia Amoroso

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136997112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

There is a vast amount of information about a city which is invisible to the human eye – crime levels, transportation patterns, cell phone use and air quality to name just a few. If a city was able to be defined by these characteristics, what form would it take? How could it be mapped?

Nadia Amoroso tackles these questions by taking statistical urban data and exploring howthey could be transformed into innovative new maps. The "unseen" elements of the city are examined in groundbreaking images throughout the book, which are complemented by interviews with Winy Maas and James Corner, comments by Richard Saul Wurman, and sections by the SENSEable City Lab group and Mark Aubin, co-founder of Google Earth.

Part I
Essays

1
Map or Drawing?

The Visual Expressions of Hugh Ferriss

Introduction

This chapter focuses on the role of drawings as graphic sources for investigating visually intangible conditions within the urban realm. The capacity of drawings to reveal possible interpretations of the city as visually and sometimes emotionally accessible information qualifies them as maps. Revealing a multidimensional view of their subject, maps are encoded with many layers of technical and abstract data reflecting the legal, environmental, economic, social and political circumstances within a city. Through the manipulation of drawing conventions and the use of abstract signs, maps guide their viewer through a maze of an artificially constructed field of forces which define the physical reality of the built environment. However, maps can never be understood as purely objective representations. While the making of a map often involves a lengthy process of gathering and interpolating large quantities of statistical materials, maps are highly controversial artifacts, which register the prevailing political demands of their cultural context and the personal input of their makers.¹

As products of a thorough investigation of a wide range of factors, maps produce both a precise and an imaginary synthesis of the present and at times future conditions within a city. If rendered by the hands of a talented artist, maps also become seductive artifacts which attract their audience with their imaginative and graphic qualities. As such, maps not only communicate a possible objective reality, but are also charged with the emotional input of their artist-maker; they embody human dimensions and experiences. They become particularly revealing evidence of urban circumstances as they are perceived and felt by individual inhabitants. Described as simultaneously artistic and informative artifacts, maps mirror and graph both the complexity of the factors that define the present reality of an urban situation, and the intuitive processes which led to their creation. As sources through which predictions about the future of a city can be made, maps are essential tools in the professions of urban planners and architects.

Hugh Ferriss: the art of mapping the invisibles

Focusing on the works of early twentieth-century artist and architect Hugh Ferriss (1889–1962), with a particular emphasis on his graphic interpretations of the 1916 zoning Ordinance of New York City, this chapter explores the potentials of drawings as media through which “invisible” dimensions of cities can be explored and revealed. Ferriss’s depictions of the zoning laws, in drawings of the Evolution of the Set-back Building, can be considered three-dimensional maps, and arguably indispensable for understanding the architecture of early twentieth-century America. Not only did his drawings become expressive vistas into the future of Manhattan’s architectural and urban design conditions, as legacies of one of the most talented artists of the period, Ferriss’s depictions also synthesize the positivist and progressive spirit of their era. These drawings foreshadowed a city which, due to its threatening qualities, was destined to remain as only pictorial. They became visual guides of the spatial container in which architects and planners can build, and these drawings helped clarify the legal and textual confusions of the by-laws. Nevertheless, his drawings left a lasting impression on their contemporary and later audiences, while their fantastic and prophetic qualities establish them as iconic evidence of a visionary brand of architecture on a par with the works of some of the greatest visionaries of all time such as Piranesi and Boullée:²

Ferriss was, in a way, an apostle of bigness – stimulated by the sight and feel of the mighty construction efforts going on around him, he exaggerated their scale in his drawings. Thus he has appropriately been compared to Piranesi, with the crucial difference that the vision of that 18th-century Italian artist, based upon the monumental relics of a long-gone past, was intensely ambiguous when not outright gloomy about human prospects. Ferriss, by contrast, extrapolated a vision of a (to him) brilliant future from the ever-changing cityscape of the present.³

The striking character of Ferriss’s drawings established the reputation of the artist as one of the most skilled draftsmen of his time. Ensuring him great success in his career, his works captured the imagination of a large audience. The extensive publicity that Ferriss received arguably affected the thinking of his contemporaries and provoked responses from them. This is one of the reasons why his drawings/ maps were so engaging. They drew the attention of a wide audience: the architect who was concerned with the overall built form; the urban planner who was interested in overall urban massing pattern; the developer who was interested in the overall floor area ratio and economical rentable space; and the urban dweller and city officials who were interested in the vitality of the city and allowing more light and air onto the streets of New York City.

In an attempt to understand the ways in which the graphic works of Ferriss functioned to inform and influence the perception of their viewers, we look at his Evolution of the Set-back Building drawings in relation to the zoning Ordinance of 1916, as both works of art and maps that exposed a “new” New York City.

The drawings

The drawings of Ferriss contributed to an all-encompassing awareness of the effects of zoning and its architectural and urban design implications. While his drawings allowed architects to sharpen their vision of a new style, commensurate with the technical innovations of their time and inspired by the aesthetic possibilities of zoning, they signaled to socially minded individuals the menacing conditions that could arise in the future. Presenting Ferriss’s maps as catalysts for the innovations which characterize the architectural movements of the early 1920s may seem an exaggerated proposition. However, the fact that his drawings consolidated and provided a clear definition of the major legal and economic shifts within the milieu of early twentieth-century American culture cannot be denied. His images spoke to all sets of audiences simply by their familiar architectural form and style. This was important, because as works of art, these drawings spoke to the general public – the citizens of New York. As maps, they guided the city planner and architect into the unknown of the zoning Ordinance. Contributing to an assessment of zoning and its consequences, Ferriss’s drawings are best described as one of the significant agents which illuminated and prepared the masses for the great changes that were about to take effect. Surfacing at a critical time, they highlighted and strengthened the prevalent mood of their age.

The influence of Ferriss on his audiences was also a consequence of his artistic abilities. In order to understand the precise methods by which the artist transformed the textual content of the Ordinance into highly expressive charcoal renderings, a close inspection of his drawing techniques and use of medium will conclude our investigation. In addition to a study of the drawings of the zoning Ordinance, much can be learnt from the writings of the artist on the art of rendering. A spokesperson for the rising profession of an “architectural delineator,” Ferriss lectured on the subject of rendering while regularly contributing articles to various journals. These materials are invaluable sources through which we gain a better understanding of the artist’s techniques. They provide us with first-hand clues about the ways in which he bridged the gap between text and image, while informing us about the methods he used to imbue his works with such gravity that it was impossible for the popular press, architects and planners to ignore them.

The power of the map-drawing

A powerful map embodies four characteristics: it is informative, revelatory, seductive, and suggestive. These categories are highlighted in the works of Ferriss to give special potency and credibility to his renditions of a contemporary and future Manhattan. In his drawings these characteristics combine to attract attention and influence perceptions of the urban environment.

Both Ferriss’s artistic and textual productions place him deeply within the debates among architects and urban planners who in the early 1920s tried to anticipate and come to terms with the new zoning law as it related to their professions. Consequently, his works cannot be understood without a consideration of the variety of forces which first led to the formulation and later application of the parameters of zoning in actual practice. Understanding the status of architecture at the time the zoning Ordinance was introduced, the coming together of the intrinsically opposing economic and reformist ideologies which facilitated the introduction of zoning, and the attitudes of architects, urban planners and the general public to these changes are all topics which will inform and enrich our investigation. The summation of these factors can be identified as the “invisible” forces which are compounded together and are given concrete shape in the drawings of Ferriss. The harmony of these forces within his drawings infuse them with visual power and potency, for what they encapsulate is an infinitely more complex depiction of urban and social facts, relevant to an understanding of early twentieth-century American life, than what his pictures would show had he only intended to produce mere literal translations of the legal material. A virtual city was implied by the zoning Ordinance; Ferriss exposed this city as it reflected the restrictions on form, the economic demands of property owners and developers, and the aesthetic concerns of architects.

Architectural art critic Christopher Humes says: “it was architectural renderer Hugh Ferriss who captured the romance of the highrise. His darkly evocative drawings pointed to the esthetic potential of this quintessential 20th-century building type.”⁴

The 1916 New York Ordinance

Drafted primarily as a response to the unsteady rate with which high-rises were spreading through downtown Manhattan, the zoning Ordinance was enacted in 1916 by the New York City Board of Estimates and Apportionment as the first c...