Hugh Ferriss architectural drawing, 1889-1962, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.
Some of the most influential figures in science fiction are not, in fact, writers or moviemakers, but the architects who imagined the city of the future and the house of tomorrow. They envisioned different ways of living. They wrote about the way our society influences our surroundings, and the way our surroundings influence us. These visions have inspired generations of writers and influenced set designs for SFF television and film.
In a way, architects are storytellers, too—and while their contributions were often made from behind the scenes, they unquestionably shape the genre. In this chapter, we explore the contributions of architects, theorists, and draftspeople . . . and the ways that genre storytellers have been inspired by their works.
Hugh Ferriss (1889–1962) was a draftsman and architectural theorist of the art deco era who, despite never working in comics, is often referred to as the “Father of Gotham City.” Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Ferriss studied architecture at Washington University in his hometown, but quickly shifted his focus to rendering sketches of potential buildings for other architects. His trademark style of illustration became highly recognizable; he often depicted buildings against a dark night sky, lit by spotlights and surrounded by shadow.
As an architect, Ferriss only oversaw a few actual buildings throughout his entire career, none of them particularly well-known. But Ferriss’s reputation does not rest on his physical structures. Instead, he is celebrated for his drawings and theories that influenced generations of architects as well as film designers. Along with Batman’s Gotham City, Ferriss’s work has inspired striking and breathtaking fictional cities like Blade Runner’s 2019 Los Angeles and The Fifth Element’s twenty-third century New York City.
In his book The Metropolis of Tomorrow, Ferriss collected his architectural philosophy and illustration, claiming modestly in the foreword (and speaking of himself in the third person), “these studies are not entirely random shots in the dark . . . his foreshadowings and interpretations spring from something at least more trustworthy than personal phantasy.”
The book contains written analysis of urban planning and policy and its implications for city living, coupled with detailed and evocative illustrations of the city both as it is and could be. In fact, it’s divided into three sections: “Cities of Today,” “Projected Trends,” and “An Imaginary Metropolis.” In that second section, he examines the consequences of New York City’s rapid urbanization and fast-sprouting skyscrapers, and “A visualization is presented of the cities which would come into existence were these trends, or these propositions, carried forward.” The third embodies his vision for a well-planned city.
This exploration presents visions of not just one possible city but many, providing a veritable grab bag of inspiration for many futurists to come. As he worked through the implications of urban planning proposals on society and everyday life, Ferriss occupied himself with precisely the topics that occupy many science-fiction writers and storytellers: What makes a dystopia? What makes a utopia? How does the way we live affect who we are? Where will this path take us? Is there an alternate and better way of living?
Hugh Ferriss architectural drawing, 1889-1962, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.
There are dystopian cities where skyscrapers tower among the clouds, vast and unrestrained; urban pyramids dot the landscape, massive as cities themselves; and the human scale is made minuscule juxtaposed with these megalithic structures. It’s easy to look at these shadowed and looming cityscapes and instantly envision a person lost in the crush of future humanity, adrift in a city grown so massive it’s devouring itself.
Indeed, these works were part of the inspiration for Blade Runner. As historian and urban theorist Carl Abbott writes in CityLab, “The iconic science fiction film Blade Runner opens with a nightmare scene of future Los Angeles. Aircars maneuver through darkness lit by fire and explosion among monolithic office towers. These commercial ziggurats . . . rise like vast pyramids over the shadowed streets.”
But it’s not all a dystopian vision. In Ferriss’s brighter renderings it’s easy to view the orderly rows of skyscrapers and imagine a utopian future where people are capable of coming together to build something bright, beautiful, and vast, a high-tech habitat for millions of humans to live together in peace and prosperity. His description of this city, and the structures that fill it, presents a future where science and the arts are valued as thoroughly as business, where religious diversity is celebrated . . . a city that Ferriss hoped could “serve in actualizing whatever may be man’s potentialities of emotional and mental well-being.” *
By the year 2050, the world population is projected to reach almost ten billion, and the majority of these people will live in cities. Paolo Soleri (1919–2013) anticipated this future. His solution: the arcology, a term he coined. Arcology is a portmanteau of “architecture” and “ecology,” reflecting Soleri’s belief that a city should function as living system, perfectly integrating people and nature.
Concrete walls, domed rooftops, and a village in the desert: the design of Tatooine, Luke Skywalker’s home planet, was said to be inspired by a visit George Lucas paid to Arcosanti. The actual scenes were shot in Tunisian deserts, where some film set relics still remain. Image from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977). Photo credit: Lucasfilm / Fox / Kobal / Shutterstock.
An arcology is a self-sufficient, self-contained city that moves upward, not outward. It’s the megastructure you’ve probably seen in countless science fiction books, movies, and video games, where people spend their whole lives in one vast building that contains all the life support systems they need. Like a generation spaceship, but on earth. Arcologies are found in The World Inside by Robert Silverberg, The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi, High-Rise by J. G. Ballard, and others.
In Arcology: The City in the Image of Man (1969), Soleri collected his drawings and sketches of imaginary cities like Novanoah and Babelnoah, invented to explore his concepts. But Soleri didn’t stop there. In 1970, Soleri and his supporters began building an actual arcology in the Arizona desert, a physical prototype and a testing ground for his philosophy. They called this “urban laboratory” Arcosanti.
Attempting to build your own city from scratch in the high desert of Arizona might seem like a slightly over-the-top move. Though a professor at Arizona State University and a relatively well-known architect, Soleri was disgruntled by society’s unwillingness to embrace his ideas—and he wanted to prove an arcology would work. By many accounts, Soleri was a controlling megalomaniac. Despite his narcissism—or perhaps because of it—he attracted a passionate group of followers, who supported his creative endeavors but also enabled his destructive behaviors. In 2017, Soleri’s daughter Daniela publicly revealed that her father had sexually abused her as a teen, a trauma that continued to haunt her even as she continued to support his work.
Of course, these revelations do cast a pall on the architect’s legacy. In an essay reflecting on her father’s complicated life, Daniela wrote, “That work will have to stand on its own, and not be seen as an inseparable part of Soleri as a person, including his best and worst behaviors. For me that work deserves recognition and use, but its value will never negate his faults, or obscure the larger lessons.”
Though Soleri passed away in 2013, Arcosanti is still under construction. Only a small part of Soleri’s original planned city has been built. Arcosanti’s primary purpose is as a hands-on learning experience for enthusiasts of eco-friendly urban planning. The site hosts more than 30,000 visitors a year. Workshop participants roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty, and help build. An onsite metal foundry enables attendees to practice the trade of metalworking and the sales from the foundry help support the project.
“Despite its compactness, Arcosanti contains all the necessities of village life: a café, a bakery, an art gallery, apartments and dorms for residents and guests, gardens and greenhouses, a foundry, woodwork and ceramic studios, an amphitheater and a swimming pool, which overlooks a static tide of sand and rocks,” wrote the Washington Post’s Andrea Sachs in 2008, after a field trip to the desert.
One of the site’s best-known visitors was George Lucas, who was said to be inspired by the aesthetics of Arcosanti as he envisioned Star Wars’ Tatooine, the desert planet of Luke Skywalker’s origin.
As a young architect, long before he began his work on Arcosanti, Soleri studied under the great Frank Lloyd Wright, arguably the most acclaimed American architect of the twentieth century. Wright’s influence can be seen in Soleri’s dedication to integrating his buildings with their natural surroundings. But while Wright’s work feels inextricably connected to mid-century modern, Soleri’s vision of the future seems to belong to another century altogether.
Writer and artist James McGirk spent five weeks at Arcosanti in 1998, past its heyday in the seventies and eighties. Writing for Wired in 2013, he looked back on the experience as compelling, enchanting, but ultimately disappointing—this idealistic community, built by flawed and ordinary humans, could never fully live up to the utopian future it promised. Still, there were moments of bliss. McGirk writes about an evening when a massive thunderstorm swept across the Arizona desert as the residents blasted classical music. “At that moment,” McGirk writes, “if you let your eyes glaze over just a bit, you could imagine yourself in a toga, a thousand years in the future, when Arcosanti was just a tiny outpost, and the entire world was tucked into an arcology. Looking back, I sometimes still suspect that Soleri’s time will come.” *
ARCOSANTI. Southern exposure.
The Arcosanti site is located about 60 miles north of Phoenix, taking Interstate-17 to Exit 262 at Cordes Junction. Since 1970 thousands of students and professionals have come to Arcosanti to participate in seminars, conferences and workshops conducted by Paolo Soleri and his staff. Photo Credit: Ken Howie.
Few individuals have had more of an influence on our vision of the future than concept artist Syd Mead (b. 1933). From his design of automobiles, hotels, and luxury aircraft to his concept art for such groundbreaking films as Aliens, Blade Runner, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and TRON, Mead’s visionary eye almost single-handedly defined the science-fiction aesthetic for a generation.
Syd Mead created the look of Blade Runner’s (1982) intimidating skyline. Photo credit: Ladd Company/ Warner Bros/ Kobal/ Shutterstock.
Mead trained as an industrial designer at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, and immediately after his graduation in 1959 he began working for the Ford Motor Company’s Advanced Styling Studio. His renown as a concept artist quickly grew, and after just two years Mead left Ford to illustrate books and catalogs for major corporate clients, including U.S. Steel. In 1970, Mead formed his own company: Syd Mead, Inc. Mead’s most notable client during this formative period was Philips Electronics, for which he created inspiring visualizations of the future: living rooms with wall-sized TVs (a very science-fictional concept at the time), hospitals with self-help kiosks, high-tech gadget-filled kitchens, and futuristic learning centers that anticipated our Internet-connected classrooms today.
Yet for all his breathtaking industrial work, Mead is probably best known for his concept art for many of the seminal science-fiction films of the eighties. He began working with Hollywood in 1979, designing the hyper-evolved sentient space probe V’Ger for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The following year, Mead was hired as a “visual futurist” by Ridley Scott to design the electrified parking meters, utilitarian vehicles, flying cars, and oppressive skyline in the smog-choked, neon-lit streets of Blade Runner. Mead went on to work on TRON, for which he designed many of the most memorable elements in that groundbreaking CGI film, including the sleek and aerodynamic light-cycles, the glowing light suits, and the distinctive “recognizer” ships. For the classic film Aliens, Mead designed the deep space USCMC ship the Sulaco, the dropship and ground vehicles, and the famous power loader in which Ripley fights the Alien Queen. Mead also worked on the films Short Circuit, Timecop, Johnny Mnemonic, and Mission: Impossible III.
The full title of this concept art by Syd Mead is Reaching for Aquarius: A Designer Looks Ahead—Party Scene. It was published in 1969 for Automobile Quarterly, accompanied by the following description from Mead: “Holographic projection offers unlimited environmental excitement by means of computer generation as shown in the background. Electronic body suits maintain muscle tone, hallucinogenic vapors from goblets provide refreshment, and electronic helmets receive, store and retrieve communications!” © Syd Mead Inc. www.sydmead.com.
Mead’s concept designs work so well because he uses his background in industrial design to envision not only how such things might look, but how they would function.
Mead once quipped, “I’ve called science fiction ‘reality ahead of schedule.’” *
