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In the early 1900s, architects looked to history to design the future. They found deep inspiration in the ancient lands of Mesopotamia. This story explains how the tale of the Tower of Babel and ancient stepped pyramids called ziggurats changed how we build cities and make movies. The focus is on Hugh Ferriss, an illustrator who showed people what the city of tomorrow would look like.
In a black-and-white drawing, you see a group of pyramid shapes and flat steps repeating in different sizes. Tall towers rise up from a base made of tiered, ziggurat-like blocks. Some towers are so tall they do not fit in the picture. The roofs of the lower buildings have tiny trees. These trees are the only signs of life. The trees match the huge shapes around them. According to the text, this futuristic skyline is home to people who enjoy roof gardens, sun porches, and open-air pools.
This was Hugh Ferriss's vision for the future city. He showed it in his 1929 book, The Metropolis of Tomorrow. Born in 1899, Ferriss trained as an architect but created a new job for himself as an "architectural delineator." He made dramatic drawings that brought other architects' plans to life. His collection, now at Columbia University, includes drawings of big projects like Rockefeller Center. It also has his own imaginative designs that have no names.
The Metropolis of Tomorrow combined Ferriss's pictures with his thoughts on the changes he saw as American cities grew fast. He made several predictions. He was right that glass would be used everywhere. However, he was wrong when he said flying boats would be common. The most famous part of the book showed a planned City of Tomorrow in the distance. This ideal city would have three special zones for art, science, and business. Each zone would center on large superblocks designed to help people stay healthy and feel good spiritually.
Ferriss's powerful pictures of tall skyscrapers became the blueprint for the popular image of the American urban future. Scholar Eric Gordon says this. His futuristic ideas influenced later visions like Norman Bel Geddes's Futurama exhibit for the 1939 New York World's Fair. It also inspired Disney's Tomorrowland and the animated show The Jetsons. Even so, Ferriss's forward-looking vision always looked back to the ancient past. He called his pyramid-shaped skyscraper a "modern ziggurat." This name reminded people of the huge buildings of ancient Mesopotamia.
Centered in what is now Iraq, the empires of Assyria and Babylon were superpowers long ago. Their remains, once thought lost, started to be found in the mid-1800s. By the 1920s, German workers had exposed Babylon's well-preserved city walls. Nearby, the city of Ur was being dug up. This work revealed lavish gold objects. These discoveries were reported in the newspapers. They showed an ancient time that seemed strangely modern. The fashions found at Ur even led to jokes about the first "flappers."
Ferriss was not alone in connecting old city shapes with the new world. At a time when modern architecture often rejected history, the idea of an original city shape shaped visions of the future.
A main question for architects in Ferriss's time was what could be learned from past traditions. Early twentieth-century training in the United States often treated Greek and Roman buildings as perfect standards. However, many builders worried that copying them made boring and useless structures. Critics called out random, mixed-up borrowing from history.
Perhaps no writer attacked this trend more than Ayn Rand. Her 1943 novel The Fountainhead, set while Ferriss worked, is a fight against copying architecture. She laughed at architects who made "shingled post offices with Doric porticos." She also mocked skyscrapers that looked "squeezed out of a pastry tube" because of too much decoration.
Ferriss also hated this fake style. He supported the modernist rule that form should follow function. Future architects, he wrote, would dismiss the idea that beauty was perfect in ancient times. Using modern tools to support "classic or medieval stage sets" was just theater, not true architecture. He showed this idea in a drawing called "Reversion to Past Styles." It warned against "piling Parthenons upon skyscrapers."
Still, Ferriss believed the past offered good models of architectural spirit, even if not specific styles. He pointed to Gothic cathedrals. Their builders used shape to lift up humanity. This belief in architecture's power to improve people had a history. This difference between shallow copying and a deep respect for eternal rules was shared by others. The Swiss modernist Le Corbusier called the Parthenon a "pure creation of the mind." He spoke about mathematical order. He saw a similar spirit in modern inventions like the telephone and automobile. Louis Sullivan, who said "form follows function," argued that rare times produced "living art." These included the Greek temple, the Gothic cathedral, and he believed, the modern skyscraper.
While Greek and Gothic models were used, they were also damaged by bad copying. For thinkers who wanted basic forms but feared reproduction, ancient Assyria and Babylon were special. They were recently found. They were linked to origins. They were connected to a famous story about a huge building: the Biblical Tower of Babel.
Western art often showed the Tower of Babel as a spiral. As people learned more about archaeology in the late 1800s and early 1900s, drawings began to imagine it as a stepped pyramid. This matched descriptions by the Greek historian Herodotus.
The Tower of Babel story ends the origin myths in Genesis. Humanity spoke one language. They decided to build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens to stay together. God saw this group project as a threat. He confused their language and scattered them across the earth.
In the early 1900s, the Tower of Babel was often linked to the new skyscraper. The meaning was mixed. It could show worry about changing cities and new values. It echoed biblical warnings about pride. The tower's link to technological overreach mixed with ideas of ancient bad behavior. The resulting "babble" of tongues also brought to mind modern, many-language cities. These places were praised for diversity but sometimes criticized for social chaos.
Yet as skyscrapers took over American skylines in the 1920s, calling a city a "modern Babylon" highlighted its shape. Stripped of bad meanings, the comparison became a way to praise. It celebrated modern technological wonders. It also held a hope that technology might bring people together again. Articles described San Francisco's reconstruction as a feat for any "ancient or modern Babylon." They noted how New York was looking more like the Babylonian skyline. They called a university skyscraper a new Tower of Babel uniting all knowledge. The Boulder Dam was called a "Modern Babylon" for using new engineering while looking like the past.
The most famous use of Babylon for a future vision was Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis. Its dark city, featuring a "new tower of Babel," was inspired by New York. The film includes a scene where the heroine tells the Babel story as a warning about worker exploitation. Her evil robot double appears as the Whore of Babylon. Lang combined grand architecture, bad behavior, and political tyranny.
Lang also used a movie style of spectacle from earlier biblical films. D.W. Griffith's 1916 film Intolerance had huge, fancy sets of ancient Babylon. Other films, like the Austrian Sodom und Gomorra (1922), had enormous ziggurats. These gave Lang a monumental way to show worlds that were both old and new.
Hugh Ferriss's retrofuturist dreams, where modern ziggurats reached for the sky, stood at a unique spot. They rejected simple copying while seeking a deeper, almost spiritual connection to foundation shapes. By looking back at the towers of ancient Mesopotamia, he and others found a powerful way to show their awe at—and their plans for—the modern city.