The future is a wonderful place to live for mind such as Syd Mead. It is one thing to imagine the future, and another to do it convincingly. Mead was able to dip his pen in the ink of the future and convince the world of what it will be. He called science fiction “reality ahead of schedule.” His creations were believable because they were the offspring of our reality. Mead formed a relationship between engineering, science, and art to birth fantastical universes that we love to dream exist within our own. The most renowned of these are Star Trek, Blade Runner, Tron, and Aliens.
Figure 1 Figure 2
In an interview with Craig Hodgetts, Syd commented “If your’e doing punk, you just add crap...tubes and stuff.” He notes that when creating this aesthetic, the work creates itself. However, there is a clear narrative that guides the “crap” that creates a believable story. When creating the vehicles for Tron, Mead studied the posture and form of cheetahs in motion. He modeled the motorcycles, Figure 1, off of the extended legs of the cheetah to give the vehicles an animalistic feel. When creating the V’ger spaceship for Star Trek, Figure 2, Mead drew inspiration from vines growing around Cambodian Temples. He further explained that his intention for the surface of the ship was to have “mechanical object overlaid by organic growth” 1.
“Architecture to me is part of the built visual landscape” 1. Buildings are not their own beings, but rather part of a language that Mead was able to interpret and translate it to us so that we could understand too. This gift gave us universes that seemed to come from our own imaginations. A breathtaking and simple example of his ability is a kitchen imagined for the Blade Runner universe, shown in Figure 3.
Nothing in this kitchen is from our world, and yet it is recognizable as a kitchen nonetheless. Mead finds the perfect balance between identifiable and “what the hell is that” by allowing us to decipher parts such as sink, stove, and countertop, but also leaving us to wonder what kind of universe this belongs in.
What makes these universes so dear to us Figure 3 is the nostalgia they hold without us ever having lived in them, or have we?
In Figure 4, Mead utilized a vintage drawing style for the illustration of the people to invoke memories of the 1950’s era. They are connected to their dystopian environment through their clothing, accessories, and placement in the scene. His work is so accomplished because he was able to create a new language that can be understood universally.
Figure 4
The future that Mead predicted is beginning to make an appearance in our present world. An Italian company called Piaggio has created a personal cargo robot called Gita, Figure 5, designed to follow its owner around with their belongings 2. The inspiration for the helpful bot was to allow people to travel more freely in congested cities. Syd Mead was able to imagine realistic problems like this and create unreal solutions. To him, reality and science fiction share the same breath. As one exhales, the other breathes in, and
another universe is born. Figure 5
1 SCI-Arc Channel, "Syd Mead and Craig Hodgetts in Conversation", March 2018.
2 Tech Crunch, "Why Piaggio Built Gita, a Cargo-Carrying Robot, to Follow in your Footsteps", January 2017.
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