Colossal Stereotomy

Abstract

The text interprets Hugh Ferriss’s work as a decisive shift in modern architecture, in which immaterial regulatory forces are rendered as vast, stone-like forms. Ferriss represents zoning envelopes as geological masses – paradoxically stereotomic yet necessarily hollow – producing a condition of “stereotomy by other means”. At the same historical moment, Ferriss’s hollow, monolithic forms coincide with the emergence of the framed building, in which structure retreats behind façades and classical language is reduced to skin-deep cladding. What appears massive is in fact thin, assembled, and lightweight rather than loadbearing. By translating abstract regulation into apparent stone at an immense urban scale, these images evoke the aesthetic of the sublime, overwhelming architectural authorship through scale and constraint rather than composition. Architecture thus appears unauthored, shaped by zoning, density, and accumulation rather than by formal intention. This transformation aligns architecture with broader cultural shifts toward the unauthored found in film, Dada, and process-based art, where form is generated rather than designed. Ferriss’s stereotomic or lithic figures unexpectedly anticipate later architectural works that deliberately pursue an unauthored aesthetic, adapting similar stone-like abstractions across different building types and scales.