DOI issue:
Rozprawy
DOI article:Idzior, Aleksandra: Imagination with no limits: the frontier in the Soviet and American projects of a "future city" at the end of the 1920s
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.42379#0085
IMAGINATION WITH NO LIMITS: THE FRONTIER IN THE SOVIET AND AMERICAN PROJECTS
83
Throughout his book, Ferriss evokes the future metropolis as a site
recalling nature’s wonders. This sense of outdoor exploration is rein-
forced by Ferriss in revealing the impact created by the initial encounter
with the future city. In the first paragraphs to “An Imaginary Metropo-
lis” he writes that “[t]he first confirmed impression of the city is [that] of
a wide plain, not lacking in vegetation, from which rise, at considerable
intervals, towering mountain peaks”.28 Upon closer inspection what ap-
pears is the further recognition that “each peak [...] is surrounded by foo-
thills”.29 It is therefore apparent that the more the viewer looks around
the urban centre, the more he/she is inserted in a man made environ-
ment that is like nature.30
Via this strategy, Ferriss not only collapsed the dichotomy between
the civilized space identified with the city into the wild area usually as-
sociated with nature, but he designated the future city as the mythopoeic
arena of the new frontier. As such, the metropolis of tomorrow would fill
the void left by the vanished historical process of the Westward move-
ment by taking on its historical function in the shaping of America’s uni-
queness. It was, after all, the conquering of the wilderness that was per-
ceived as a conditioning factor in the country’s mastering of its ingenuity,
which stood on a symbolic level for moral renewal and spiritual refresh-
ment. In other words, the city imagined by Ferriss was identified as or-
Prairie: The Metropolitan Frontier and American Politics, New York-London 1970; The
West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920, ed. by William
H. Truettner, Washington-London 1991; Gerald D. Nash, Creating the West: Historical
Interpretations, 1890-1990, Albuquerque 1991; Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest:
The Unbroken Past of the American West, New York 1987; Richard Slotkin, The Fatal
Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890, New
York 1985; Carl Abbott, The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West,
Tucson 1995; Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbols and Myth,
Cambridge (MA) 1950; Frontier Cities: Encounters at the Crossroads of Empire, ed. by Jay
Gitlin, Barbara Berglund, Adam Arenson, Philadelphia 2013. Despite a growing tendency
of scholars to react against the Turner doctrine, it is still a very familiar interpretation of
the American past. On Turner and his legacy see: Ray Allen Billington, Frederick Jackson
Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher, New York 1973; Ray Allen Billington, The Genesis of
the Frontier Thesis: A Study in Historical Creativity, San Marino (Calif.) 1971; Wilbur
R. Jacobs, The Historical World of Frederick Jackson Turner, New Haven-London 1968.
28 Ferriss, op. cit., p. 109.
29 Ibidem, p. 110.
30 Barbara Novak’s observations on the sublime in the 19th century American land-
scape painting, seem to be a fitting appendage to Ferriss’s commentary: “For the vast ex-
pansive prairies, the immense extensions of space, the awesome mountains, the forbidding
and majestic scale that characterized the varied landscape of the West could only then, as
now, be called «sublime».” Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and
Painting, 1825-1875, New York 1980, p. 149.
83
Throughout his book, Ferriss evokes the future metropolis as a site
recalling nature’s wonders. This sense of outdoor exploration is rein-
forced by Ferriss in revealing the impact created by the initial encounter
with the future city. In the first paragraphs to “An Imaginary Metropo-
lis” he writes that “[t]he first confirmed impression of the city is [that] of
a wide plain, not lacking in vegetation, from which rise, at considerable
intervals, towering mountain peaks”.28 Upon closer inspection what ap-
pears is the further recognition that “each peak [...] is surrounded by foo-
thills”.29 It is therefore apparent that the more the viewer looks around
the urban centre, the more he/she is inserted in a man made environ-
ment that is like nature.30
Via this strategy, Ferriss not only collapsed the dichotomy between
the civilized space identified with the city into the wild area usually as-
sociated with nature, but he designated the future city as the mythopoeic
arena of the new frontier. As such, the metropolis of tomorrow would fill
the void left by the vanished historical process of the Westward move-
ment by taking on its historical function in the shaping of America’s uni-
queness. It was, after all, the conquering of the wilderness that was per-
ceived as a conditioning factor in the country’s mastering of its ingenuity,
which stood on a symbolic level for moral renewal and spiritual refresh-
ment. In other words, the city imagined by Ferriss was identified as or-
Prairie: The Metropolitan Frontier and American Politics, New York-London 1970; The
West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920, ed. by William
H. Truettner, Washington-London 1991; Gerald D. Nash, Creating the West: Historical
Interpretations, 1890-1990, Albuquerque 1991; Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest:
The Unbroken Past of the American West, New York 1987; Richard Slotkin, The Fatal
Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890, New
York 1985; Carl Abbott, The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West,
Tucson 1995; Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbols and Myth,
Cambridge (MA) 1950; Frontier Cities: Encounters at the Crossroads of Empire, ed. by Jay
Gitlin, Barbara Berglund, Adam Arenson, Philadelphia 2013. Despite a growing tendency
of scholars to react against the Turner doctrine, it is still a very familiar interpretation of
the American past. On Turner and his legacy see: Ray Allen Billington, Frederick Jackson
Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher, New York 1973; Ray Allen Billington, The Genesis of
the Frontier Thesis: A Study in Historical Creativity, San Marino (Calif.) 1971; Wilbur
R. Jacobs, The Historical World of Frederick Jackson Turner, New Haven-London 1968.
28 Ferriss, op. cit., p. 109.
29 Ibidem, p. 110.
30 Barbara Novak’s observations on the sublime in the 19th century American land-
scape painting, seem to be a fitting appendage to Ferriss’s commentary: “For the vast ex-
pansive prairies, the immense extensions of space, the awesome mountains, the forbidding
and majestic scale that characterized the varied landscape of the West could only then, as
now, be called «sublime».” Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and
Painting, 1825-1875, New York 1980, p. 149.