1889-1962
Architectural Delineator

Recorder and Inspirer.

Hugh Ferriss was a trained architect whose preferred tools were paper and charcoal pencils. For more than three decades beginning in the 1920s, he was America's most-respected "delineator" — artistic renderer — of urban architecture. As delineator he provided both early design sketches and fully developed presentation drawings for more than one hundred architectural firms during the 1920s. Many of these commissioned drawings were published in trade journals, popular magazines, and newspapers, as were Ferriss's noncommercial visions of the urban scene. Recording the evolution of city architecture, particularly of the skyscraper, Ferriss's drawings also helped inspire and direct the changes that occurred during the decade.

Early Life and Career. .

Ferriss was born in Saint Louis, where he earned an architectural degree from Washington University in 1911. After a year as an apprentice draftsman with the architectural firm of Mariner and La Beaume, he...