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Bleak Chic to Future Perfect
"The premise is more based on science than on fiction," Mead says. "You can't imagine something you can't imagine."
Mead points out the familiar touchstones -- vehicles, clothing, houses -- that pull viewers into strange lands. He tweaks the recognizable objects into futuristic forms. Cars become flying "spinners" inspired by Harrier jets. People wear pressure suits that resemble lobster shells. Monumental structures take their cue from ancient Greece and Rome.
  A new documentary, "Visual Futurist: the Art and Life of Syd Mead" explores the man behind such works as "Asteroid Mining with Shuttle Launch" (1984), above. (Copyright Syd Mead) |
"It's accurate, but completely improbable," he says. "The reality is that we are wondering whether we can get man to Mars."
Mead worries that his most memorable work has become a cliche, and winces as he says " 'Blade Runner'-esque."
For that film's futuristic city, Mead started with a Manhattan streetscape, then enlarged the scale by 300 percent. With buildings rising to 3,000 feet, he redesigned the bases as pyramids, and he layered architectural styles to achieve a "retro deco" look. Unlike such early 20th-century films as "Metropolis" (1927), which portrayed the city of the future as clean and smoothly functional, Mead made "Blade Runner" eclectic, chaotic and highly technical "in an almost punitive way."
Mead says he doesn't subscribe to "Blade Runner's" bleak view.
"I helped Ridley do a professionally dreary film," says Mead, referring to director Ridley Scott. "That is no reflection on my own vision."
He flips quickly to an illustration in "Oblagon," which shows a flourishing hydroponic garden and a utopian city in full sun. That's his way of saying the future might yet bring "Elysian gardens, at least in pockets," if we get our act together.
While waiting for the future to catch up with his visions, Mead keeps busy on Planet Earth. He has designed super-yachts, nightclub interiors, theme parks, hotels, video games and snowboard graphics. He calls an $87 million flying palace for the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia "the single most challenging and satisfying design project I've ever done."
His Apple laptop contains tantalizing works-in-progress: A next-generation luxury car in bronzed glass has a periscope for forward vision. A state-of-the-art tower scrolls skyward from a flying saucer-like base -- a work for a client in the Middle East.
Mead is also thinking about anti-gravity private conveyances, but they -- like his steel "jump vehicles" from the 1960s -- seem way ahead of the times.
Mead often is asked why the future he paints, and which sci-fi films extol, has not come true. He believes it has, in a fashion.
"We have the iPod, cellphones, BlackBerrys and tons of stuff orbiting the Earth," he says. It's just that "the future did not come true across the board."
