SYD MEAD Future Cities
SYD MEAD Fu t u re C i t i e s
Future Tokyo, 1991 Syd Mead Gouache 50 x 76 cm
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SYD MEAD IN BERLIN Markus Penell
What I like so much about Syd Mead and why we believe that an exhibition, a small presentation, would do Berlin good: The main character of Blade Runner is the city with all its stationary and mobile elements. The residents, both human and hybrid, appear rather awkward in comparison. At the same time the city is as present as it is blurred, incomprehensible: a city consisting of movable lights and stationary darkness, reflecting something of lost cultures, familiar historical architecture, newly collaged to create a timeless glaze. The incessant rain gives the entire thing a blurred feeling, a sense of longing, the image of a city to which – entirely unlike the usual kind of advertising – one becomes addicted. Perhaps the urban vision comes from a future, but it could also be a parallel world, which, through a shift in the course of history, is the present day. The project for the “Urbane Mitte am Gleisdreieck” in Berlin could become a piece of the city, a part of this vision on a small scale. Important elements are anticipated in the film: the sharp play of light, the permanent movement of several elements, the mix of familiar surfaces and glazes. This new and different piece of city would do Berlin good, and an exhibition could be the best stimulant for generating something of this kind. We are in the film.
Urbane Mitte am Gleisdreieck, Berlin O&O Baukunst
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„I‘VE CALLED SCIENCE FICTION REALITY AHEAD OF SCHEDULE“ Boris Hars-Tschachotin
Hollywood, spring of 1982: the telephone rings at designer Syd Mead’s. Ridley Scott is calling. He asks how Mead wants to be described in the film credits for his work on Blade Runner, soon to be launched in the cinema. Mead thinks for a moment and then says: “visual futurist”. In this moment he invented his own job description. This story also illustrates the enormous respect that one of Hollywood’s most brilliant (and most feared) directors of the 1980s had for Mead and the legendary work he did on Blade Runner. Scott originally hired Mead to design the cars, something for which Mead was already famous. As an industrial designer, he had designed innumerable cars for Ford, Honda and US Steel, among others. Mead impressed the director already at his first presentation, when he did not simply present his automobile designs against a white background but showed them embedded in a world, a setting that exuded precisely the darkness and squalidness that Scott wanted for his movie. The director engaged Mead on the spot to design the entire Blade Runner cosmos: from the vehicles to the interiors to the skyscrapers. “So, I painted my way into the rest of the movie”, Syd Mead said decades later, describing his extensive work on the cult film. This year, the dystopian vision of Blade Runner overlaps with our present-day reality. The story, set in Los Angeles in November 2019, invokes a toxic, rainlashed enormous urban Moloch, glowing in neon light – which, once seen, inevitably contaminates our memory. This urban nightmare, a cold concrete cosmos resembling a petrified hell in which people lose themselves like ants, is controlled and dominated by the Tyrell Corporation, which produces “replicants”. One of the main reasons Blade Runner remains so iconic is that, with its wealth of details, the dystopian Los Angeles presented feels like a real place. The daring, post-modern, apocalyptic city is the unmistakable star of the film. It drives the story onward with its own specific rules. Mead developed the city as a collage of
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Deckard‘s Kitchen, 1981 Movie: Blade Runner Gouache 25 x 38 cm
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run-down architecture, elements of cultures from the distant past such as Mayan civilisation, and the timeless appearance of the 700-storey megatowers. All pipes, cables and outdated technologies overrun the buildings. The visual impact of the urban anti-utopia of Blade Runner is already evident in Syd Mead’s precisely created gouaches. But what, in fact, characterizes a visual futurist? The way Syd Mead sees it, a visual futurist is someone who, by using all the refinements of painting, can present the future convincingly, like a photo of the future. He employs the technique of gouache, water-based paints that can be used in thin washes but also to make opaque layers of colour and therefore combine the qualities of water-colours and oil paints. The process he uses to create his gouache renderings, as Mead often calls his works, is highly complex. From the first scribbles, rapidly made in quick succession, to precisely constructed, perspective-based line drawings, to the final illustrations in gouache, this lengthy and highly elaborate process is comparable to the way in which multi-layered oil paintings were created during the Renaissance era. No matter whether Syd Mead designs a toaster, a spaceship or a vision of an urban future, he always thinks in terms of stories, scenes. Each of his pictures is like its own cosmos, bursting with ideas. For instance, when asked by General Electrics in 1979 to design a city of the future, he painted a breath-taking panorama of self-driving cars, flying, blue-red transparent drones that direct the smoothly flowing streams of traffic, and a hovering police vehicle whose glass cockpit reflects the evening sun. The scene looks entirely credible and complete in itself. You could easily think that it is based on a film still from a pioneering science fiction film. Mead’s richly colourful images are always filled with details arranged with a keen feeling for the composition of foreground, middle ground and background
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and equipped with sophisticated lighting moods. It is always worthwhile to take a closer look and to engage with his visual stories, which are brimming with technical arabesques. Born in Minnesota in 1933, for the young Syd Mead the adventures of the science fiction heroes Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon offered a window into a fantastical world in that shaped the future designer lastingly, a place where he could dream and draw. Today, he still does both with great enthusiasm and tireless passion, looking far ahead into the future of other, distant worlds, which often seem foreign and yet at the same time familiar. As a visual futurist, Syd Mead has decisively influenced our ideas of what is possible in the near and more remote future. Through his work for film in particular he has projected comprehensible and convincing images into our heads. Cineastes with a fondness for science fiction know that behind his name there is a design legend. At the mention of films such as Blade Runner, Alien, Tron, Mission to Mars and Elysium, a cascade of unforgettable, visually overwhelming worlds immediately comes to mind. Mead has lastingly influenced the popular image of the future since the start of the 1960s. He had already thought about the possibility of self-driving cars as well as car-to-car communication at a time when few cars had safety belts and airbags were still a product of the future. Before he conceived the universe for many pioneering science fiction films, Mead had already worked for a decade as an industrial designer for Philips Electronics, Intercontinental, Minolta, Sony and many other firms. The question about how our future can be designed, in particular in the megacities, is like a red thread that extends through his oeuvre. SYD MEAD – FUTURE CITIES offers the first ever invitation to take an exclusive look at his urban visions and provides an insight into the creative world of one the great futurists, industrial designers and creators of images of our time.
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Blue Ring Bay Arial View – GRID, 1983 Movie: GRID Gouache 20 x 50 cm
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I think of my artwork as a fake photograph. Of something that doesn’t exist yet. Early on in my career I met other designers who wanted to know how I could imagine something so accurately without it ever existing. I said, well that’s easy. It’s a theoretical solution using all the same rules that you would use to design an actual object. You just end up making a very photographically accurate picture of it. 9
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I had a meeting with Ridley Scott and Michael Deeley, who was the producer of Blade Runner, in Hollywood. Ridley wanted to make a noire science fiction film. (‌) 2019 was the target day, which of course is this year. It was a fantastic opportunity to work with a man who had all this stuff going on in his mind. My task was to come up with ideas for the vehicles first. Because they would take the longest to create. All of the vehicles I designed were characters in the film. I knew that immediately. I presented Ridley with the ideas of my vehicles in situ in the ambience in which they would probably be used in the story. And he liked that very much. And he appreciated the fact that I understood what he was after in terms of this rough, scruffy, glaring, noire mood. So, I painted my way into the rest of the movie.
Downtown Cityscape, 1981 Movie: Blade Runner Gouache 25 x 38 cm
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The cars as we know them now, are going to change into self-driving, self-aware cabinets on wheels. They’ll become sentient entities that you climb inside of and they go somewhere. The trouble is, mixing the two together with normal driven cars. I envision a time when your car will tell other cars in the system that this car is being driven by a human, so be very, very careful!
Control Center, 2004 Movie: Lunar Scout Commandos Gouache 25 x 50 cm
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TRUIA Disco, 1986 Flowmaster, Ink 35 x 60 cm
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Los Angeles Skyline – Night, 1981 Movie: Blade Runner Gouache 52 x 62 cm
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My idea was to create a compressed, sort of a retro look to the street set. We called it “retro deco”. I got every architectural theme I could think of, Byzantine and Maya and modern and Art Deco and just pushed them all together.
A drawing is a facility for rapidly producing an image. Now people do it digitally, but nevertheless, the computer doesn’t do it from scratch, you still have to learn how to draw. You have to learn how to put an image on paper or medium. And then you can go ahead and design things to match what your vision is, once you’ve started to make a picture of it.
Street Scene – Sumo – Line Drawing, 1981 Movie: Blade Runner Pencil 38 x 25 cm
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Street Scene – Sumo, 1981 Movie: Blade Runner Gouache 35 x 22 cm
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Future Urban Architecture, 1979 Gouache 50 x 91 cm
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With an industrial design education, you know how things work, how they are made. And that helped enormously. Because when I design a fantasy vehicle, you can synthesize the same process that it takes to make a real vehicle. So, my designs, even though they might be futuristic, looked like they could be actually made.
Joystick-Arcade, 1983 Gouache 50 x 76 cm
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Vehicle Interior, 2000 Movie: The Core Ink 21 x 27 cm
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Hopefully it will be a workable future that everybody enjoys and understands and can contribute to it. When you live in a society that has this intense urban mentality, you have to take part in a civil contract of agreement that you’re going to be cooperative with everybody else. If that doesn’t work, then you are in big trouble. I worked on cruise ships, super yachts, motorcycles, other mobility ideas, and corporate graphics. And it’s just a matter of directing your focus on what the real design problem is. And then you go ahead and use your rules to carefully solve it.
L.A. 2015 – Street View with Information Kiosk, 1986 Movie: L.A. 2015 Flowmaster, Ink 43 x 60 cm
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Future Loading Dock, 1988 Gouache 73 x 50 cm
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The style of painting that I think I am good at is a very carefully delineated object. It’s called rendering. You have light to dark, light to dark, light to dark. Gouache dries optically flat. So, the advantage was that my artwork was optically flat for photography. Plus there’s the fact that opaque watercolor gouache is easy to work with. Because you can correct mistakes, you can paint over it. (…) It’s a tactile medium. But with the paint that I use, you can do very fine, fine hair line work.
Cityscape – Lightening, 1981 Movie: Blade Runner Gouache 25 x 38 cm
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Sunset – GRID, 1983 Movie: GRID Gouache 20 x 50 cm
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My entire career, I always tried to make the future look beautiful. Because in my mind, maybe it’s simplistic, philosophically, but I think if you illustrate a nice future over and over and over again, maybe you’ll help it come true to that look. (…) I think it’s a rehearsal for a bright future as opposed to a bad future. 27
I’ve always, from a very early age, depicted my ideas in their own scenario. Nothing exists by itself in a blank way nowhere. So, the scenario around the things that I design is very important. Because it makes the world that they’re in, the fantasy world or the pretend world, the future world, look more believable. The future is both an illusion and the real result of everybody working together to make the future come true. Hopefully in a nice way.
Tokyo Bay Boat Race, 1983 Gouache 50 x 76 cm
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The future is driven by the total combination of everybody’s efforts. By technology. By breakthroughs that we never imagined could happen maybe five, ten years ago. All of the sudden you get a kick and you get an acceleration into a future that is very different than what everybody imagined two years ago. It’s a very flexible, a very dynamic thing, the future.
Princess Castle Aerial View, 1986 Movie: Princess of Mars Flowmaster, Ink 38 x 60 cm
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Anticipa, 1999 Gouache 38 x 62 cm
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We’re already making internal landscapes in cities. Gardens going over the top of streets and so forth. (…) I think what’s going to happen is you’re going to just have to keep breaking it down into little precincts and make these precincts self-governing, to a certain extent. And treat big, big cities like a small, small countries.
Nomat City, 1996 Gouache 38 x 50 cm
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Kangwa Aeriel, 1996 Gouache 50 x 76 cm
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Dome City, 2003 Movie: Lunar Scout Commandos Gouache 25 x 38 cm
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Opening reception at the O&O Depot
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Syd Mead was born on 18 July 1933 in St. Paul, Minnesota and completed his studies at the Art Center School in Los Angeles (now the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena) with honours in 1959. His career began in the Advanced Styling Studio of the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, where he designed a number of visionary means of transportation. In the following years, business clients such as Philips Electronics, Allis Chalmers, United States Steel, Honda, Sony and many other large international clients followed, for whom Syd Mead produced numerous book and catalogue illustrations. In 1970, he founded Syd Mead Inc. Since then he has expanded his portfolio to include interior design and architecture and has carried out numerous concepts and design work for large clients. He has designed toasters, space suits, cars, hotel interiors and skyscrapers. The interior of the Concorde also profited from his profound commitment to design. In the 1970s, Mead’s meticulous gouache illustrations took up modern concepts, combined them with scientific and aesthetic ideas and transformed them into remote spheres of the 21st century. His early work experiences lastingly shaped his later film worlds. He always designed within the context of what is technically conceivable and plausible and, despite the visionary nature of his aesthetic, suggested an everyday world of the future. Since his childhood, Mead has had a weakness for transportation methods of all kinds. Up the present day he has never neglected an opportunity to use his typical mix of futurism and credibility
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for these design tasks. Thanks to his unique style and inexhaustible wealth of ideas, Syd Mead was granted the Automotive Lifetime Achievement award in 2017. In 1979, the film industry recognised his outstanding ability to visualise the future. His iconic work can be seen in feature films such as Star Trek: The Film, Blade Runner, Tron, 2010, Aliens, Mission Impossible-3 and, most recently, Blade Runner 2049. Sir Richard Taylor, who among other things was responsible for the special effects in Tron, once said: “Syd’s works remind you of something that you have never seen before.” Mead is also involved in a number of design projects. He has published books and a series of educational DVDs that have found their way to the studios of large businesses, to students, designers and fans across the world. In 2018, the first volume of his autobiography, A Future Remembered, was published, devoted to his film art. A further publication about his work, Sentury II, is also currently available. Syd Mead’s enthusiasm and curiosity about our age and its rapid developments, and his ability to develop these and project them into the future, has an electrifying quality about it that he has retained to the present day. At the age of 86, he still reads a great deal, is excellently networked in all the areas of the industry that help design the future and is also in regular contact with a great many young creative people.
Filmography (selection): 1979 1982 1984 1986 1990 1992 1994 1995 2000 2006 2013 2015 2017
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Production Illustrator) Tron (Production Designer / Conceptual Artist) Blade Runner (Visual Futurist) 2010: The Year We Make Contact (Visual Futurist) Aliens (Conceptual Artist) Short Circuit („Number 5“, Robot Design) Solar Crisis (Production Design) From Time to Time (Production Design for the future Paris) Timecop (Visual Consultant) Johnny Mnemonic (Visual Consultant) Strange Days („SimStim“ Design: Playback Deck) Software (Production Design) Mission to Mars (Conceptual Artist, Vehicle Design) Mission: Impossible III (Mask Maker Machine Design) Elysium (Concept Art) Tomorrowland (Visual Futurist) Blade Runner 2049 (Visual Futurist)
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SYD MEAD Future Cities 14.11.2019 – 16.01.2020 Conception: Markus Penell (O&O Baukunst) Curator: Boris Hars-Tschachotin Coordination: Marlen Burghardt, Ingrid Ortner Construction: Steve Gödickmeier Text: Boris Hars-Tschachotin, Markus Penell Translation: Roderick O‘Donovan Copyediting: Ada St. Laurent Graphic Design: Marie Hareiter Illustrations: FinestImages / O&O Baukunst (p. 3) Boris Hars-Tschachotin (p. 36) Steve Gödickmeier (p. 37) Jenny Risher (p. 38) Marcus Schneider (Reproduction) All Syd Mead quotes are from the documentary film „Syd Mead Future Cities“ by Boris HarsTschachotin, Medea Film in cooperation with O&O Baukunst 2019 N°
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We wish to extend a special thank you to our lenders Syd Mead, Roger Servick und Mike Lund.
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