Urban designer, United States Best known for his dramatic depictions of the monumental architecture of a futuristic, urban utopia, Hugh Ferriss contributed significantly in the 1920s and 1930s to an appreciation for urban design within academic and professional circles, but more so among a lay audience. Although he was a licensed architect, he chose not to build. He dedicated his career to drawing, writing, and urban planning, becoming the preferred renderer and consultant to some of the most notable practitioners of his day. Although Ferriss shared with his modernist peers a belief in architecture’s agency in improving urban society, he rejected the industrial references assumed in many of their proposals. He sought to invest his designs with a spirituality that he felt absent both in international style modernism and in an America dominated by corporate activity; the skyscraper—the new icon of that activity—became his fundamental subject. His writings remained less polemical and ulti...