APARTMENTS ON BRIDGES
Harvey Wiley Corbett and Hugh Ferriss, 1925
A Vision for a Metropolis of the Future
In 1925, the owners of Wanamaker’s department store in New York City, established since the late nineteenth century and known as a retailer of beautiful and sophisticated goods from all over the world, decided to hold an exhibition to attract publicity. The theme was modern city design and the title, ‘Titan City: A Pictorial Prophecy of New York 1929–2026’, gave a clue as to the scale of the architecture and the ambition of the display. The architect Harvey Wiley Corbett and the artist Hugh Ferriss, who had been collaborating for a while on futuristic illustrations of city buildings, especially skyscrapers, jumped at the chance this offered. ‘I think this is a most interesting opportunity’, writes Corbett, ‘to get someone to pay for the futuristic ideas we have discussed.’
Ferriss must have agreed. He had ten years’ experience in New York City as a freelance architectural illustrator, had honed his own style and would have seen the exhibition as a major job that could bring him publicity. Several artists and architects were involved in the exhibition, and Corbett and Ferriss played a major role. The show featured models of buildings designed by Corbett. There were also a number of Ferriss’s illustrations, in his atmospheric, finely painted, shadow-clouded style.
This was the period when American cities were growing rapidly and many Americans began to see their ideal home as somewhere in the town rather than on a patch of land in the country. American architects and planners started to address seriously how they could improve and beautify cities. They embraced high-rise with enthusiasm, and competed to build the tallest skyscraper. At the same time, they developed the setback, the layout in which a building gets narrower higher up, allowing sunlight to get to the streets below. So skyscrapers dominated Ferriss’s illustrations for the Titan City, but there were also other self-consciously modern features such as mooring points for airships and a recent idea for building development: apartments set on bridges.
The notion of putting accommodation – either dwellings or offices – on a bridge is an old one: medieval and Renaissance cities often had buildings with shops and houses. The idea’s revival seems to have begun with the architect Raymond Hood. He saw that cities such as New York were filling up fast – even the space for skyscrapers was limited, especially on a crowded island such as Manhattan. But the fact that Manhattan was surrounded by water was an opportunity – constructing more bridges could not only improve transport but also increase the available living space. So Ferriss, following in Hood’s footsteps, drew a scaled-up suspension bridge in which the two towers are skyscrapers full of apartments, and apartments also spread out onto the span of the bridge, filling the area between the suspension chains and the bridge deck, while still allowing space for traffic to move across.
The effect is bizarre, transforming a suspension bridge, usually a rather insubstantial-looking structure, into a solid and rather lumpy object. It looks an unlikely piece of engineering: the balancing of forces involved, not to mention the provision for expansion and contraction to cope with outside temperature changes, seem daunting to say the least. But both Hood and Ferriss claimed that the design could work structurally. In his proposals for New York, Hood presented a plan of Manhattan with the whole island ringed with apartment bridges. Spreading the city out across the Hudson and East rivers was an audacious concept to say the least. It would have taken many years to construct, even if it could be made to work.
The Titan City exhibition proved successful, both in attracting people to Wanamaker’s store and in stimulating architects to think more about city design. Ferriss developed his ideas in further drawings. He believed passionately that his role as an architectural artist was not only to illustrate the ideas of architects, but also to show those architects how architecture could develop further. He tried to put this into practice in a book, The Metropolis of Tomorrow, which was published in 1929.
In The Metropolis of Tomorrow, Ferriss returns to the idea of Apartments on Bridges, with another illustration. There is enough detail in this to pick out individual windows and to get an idea of the building’s gargantuan scale: the towers alone, at fifty or sixty floors each, are enormous – more than half the height of the Empire State, for example, which was to become the world’s tallest building when construction finished two years after Ferriss’s publication. Much more accommodation is ranged between the towers and on the short approach spans at either end of the bridge.
Ferriss’s drawings are very powerful. They rely on strong contrast, with buildings shining out in white against a dark sky, or looming darkly against a pale background. They are not always finely detailed – the effect is often rather like a soft-focus photograph. But they give a very strong sense of the shape and form of buildings – skyscrapers especially – and of their gigantic scale.
Ferriss points out the advantages in his accompanying text: ‘At first glance it would appear that such a location for office or residence is unusually desirable as to exposure, light and air. We may naturally assume landing stages, at the bases of the towers, for launch, yacht and hydroplane – whence it would be only a minute by elevator, to one’s private door.’ He also adds a note of humour, recalling that ‘facetious minds’ have alleged that the apartments might make domestic life bizarre or even dangerous: ‘On the other hand, serious minds have claimed that the project is not only structurally sound but possesses unusual advantages, financially.’ However, the construction costs would have been vast, even if the watery real estate on which the bridges were built was cheaper than anywhere on New York’s streets or avenues.
Hood’s and Ferriss’s bizarre idea was unlikely ever to be constructed once, let alone in the numbers proposed by Hood in his map of Manhattan. However, the design still has its admirers, as much as anything because of the power of Ferriss’s illustrations. His work has been impressing people since it first appeared in the 1920s. An article in the British Architects’ Journal in 1927 sang his praises: ‘Hugh Ferriss stands unequalled in his power to evoke the immediacy, the largeness, the ultimate sanity of great modern architecture. North Americans may well be proud of him.’
