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Hugh Ferriss: The Four Stages

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I was really drawn to the drawings by Hugh Ferriss. As it turns out, these were not the only sketches he did. His profession was making concept sketches of buildings but he was never part of the actual building process. I wanted to know more, specifically about the drawings he completed for the zoning requirements. During the early 20th century, in the U.S., there was a massive amount of skyscrapers being build and designed. This was made possible thanks to the advances in steel and concrete that allowed architects to stretch their ideas to their greatest potential. This helped them to create buildings that were larger in width and taller in height. The drawings I mentioned before are known as “The Four Stages” or the “Evolution of the …show more content…

This was done to create a simplified layout for the steel construction and elevator circulation. The fourth stage was the final structure. This building had a central tower of about 1,000 feet high with seventy stories that was flanked by side buildings of forty stories with the same stepped edges on each side (Skyscraper). By Ferriss’ mid-thirties, he was extremely busy with large projects that often avoid details to favor the simple mass and presence of the building. He did this to provoke the idea that the building was a solid from rather than a small creation (Skyscraper). Many of his peers highly respected him and he was internationally famous for his work. It has been said that, “is ability to mesh architecture and art gave him a unique place in the building industry.” His genius ideas are mostly noticed in the way he outlined architecture. In 1915, he became the first freelance architectural renderer and was most notable for his use of values as a way to establish the foreground and background. The reason for this is because he flipped the contrast on its head, quite literally. Instead of using the traditional idea of the building being light on top that fades into dark of the bottom, he drew his buildings with a very dark top that faded into a light bottom.(Beyond).
Inevitably, I could not find very much information about “The Four Stages” drawings that was not repetitive. Every site basically told me the same

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