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Modern Babylon: Ziggurat Skyscrapers and Hugh Ferriss' Retrofuturism
In the early twentieth century, architects turned to a newly discovered past to craft novel visions of the future: the ancient history of Mesopotamia. Eva Miller traces how both the mythology of Babel and reconstructions of stepped-pyramid forms influenced skyscraper design, speculative cinema in the 1910s and 20s, and, above all else, the retrofuturist dreams of Hugh Ferriss, architectural delineator extraordinaire.
His futurism anticipated and influenced Norman Bel Geddes, as he created his Futurama for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the Walt Disney Company’s Tomorrowland, TV’s The Jetsons, and numerous other prognostications of the rational planned city, the elevated expressway, and the heliport. The Swiss modernist Le Corbusier, perhaps the most famous prophet of planned future cities, cited the Parthenon as the apogee of an architecture of basic geometric forms, “pure creation of the mind”, evoking “emotion of a superior, mathematical order” and embodying a spirit of “imagination and cold reason”. As historical knowledge of ancient Iraq grew in the latter decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, archaeological reconstructions imagined the mythical urban tower as a stepped pyramid — similar to the descriptions of Babylonian buildings by the Greek historian Herodotus.
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