Visual Futurist: The Art and Life of Syd Mead

For legendary illustrator Syd Mead, science fiction is "reality ahead of schedule."

That should give architects pause. Mead is responsible for the intense settings of the 1982 sci-fi motion-picture show Blade Runner. His brilliant, disturbing vision of Los Angeles, circa 2019 (above), defined for a generation the look and feel of civilization's imminent collapse.

Mead didn't conjure his time to come Fifty.A. from scratch. He blew up a Manhattan skyline past 300 percent and fabricated a few modifications. He figured that stretching the skyscrapers to 3,000 feet would mean accommodating many more than people, so he redesigned the bases as pyramids to provide more entryways. He mixed a stew of historical styles into what he calls "retro deco." The darkly glorious results are preserved in the book Oblagon: Concepts of Syd Mead. A quarter-century subsequently, nosotros're still not there. Only the fantasy looks strangely plausible.

Syd Mead, Oblagon Inc., world wide web.sydmead.com

At 73, Mead is in his element. His work was recognized in October with a special jury commendation from the Smithsonian'south National Pattern Awards. A director'south cut of Blade Runner is due for release next twelvemonth, on the film's 25th anniversary. And a documentary, Visual Futurist: The Fine art and Life of Syd Mead, is making the rounds. Author/managing director Joaquin Montalvan captures Mead as a bespectacled genius at the cartoon table, tweaking elements of industrial applied science into the stuff of dreams.

Mead, who lives in Pasadena, Calif., began making his marker on Hollywood with the Five'ger spaceship for Star Trek: The Motion Movie (1979). He created the electronic netherworld of Tron (1982), the Sulaco spacecraft for Aliens (1986), the Leonov ship in 2010 (1984), and a mask-making car for this twelvemonth's Mission: Impossible Three.

Mead has designed superyachts, nightclubs, theme parks, hotels, video games, snowboard graphics, and an $87-million flying palace for the late King Fahd of Saudi arabia. Current projects include a tower for a client in the Middle Eastward, which springs from a base that looks suspiciously like a flying saucer.

Mead describes himself as "disturbingly rational," merely is willing to concede that others might encounter him equally "carefully crazy."

He sees petty mystery in his method, which involves painting meticulous scenarios that bring scripts to life and provide the basis for prop and set structure. The calibration is inevitably larger than life, the silence deafening, the scenes—trucks marching beyond a moonscape on robotic legs—bizarre

"The premise is based more on science than on fiction," Mead says. "You lot can't imagine something you can't imagine."

Bract Runner remains his monument. Different Metropolis (1927), which portrayed the city of the hereafter equally clean and smoothly functional, Mead fabricated Blade Runner cluttered and technical "in an about punitive way."

Mead personally doesn't subscribe to that bleak view, and as proof he points to an illustration in Oblagon showing a utopian city in full sun. That'due south his way of saying the future might still bring "Elysian gardens, at least in pockets," if we become our act together. (107 minutes; www.withoutabox.com)

Sketches of Frank Gehry

Sony

The earth'due south best-known architect comes across as cheery, if complicated, in managing director Sydney Pollack's warmly appealing bio-documentary. But the plot never twists far plenty to explain where Gehry's radical vision comes from or how he persuades clients to test the limits of probability, as his masterworks such as the Guggenheim Bilbao do. For illumination on that talent, seek out Jeffrey Kipnis' 2003 picture, A Constructive Madness: Wherein Frank Gehry & Peter Lewis Spend a Fortune and a Decade, End Upwards With Nil and Change the World. (83 minutes; www.amazon.com)

Building for Democracy: The Pocket-size Town Banks of Louis Sullivan

Northwest Architectural Archives, University of Minnesota

Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) was past his elevation when he accepted commissions for eight banks across the Midwest. The buildings remembered in this Siena Workshop documentary would never steal the limelight from his skyscrapers, but they prove that originality never eluded the architect. (35 minutes; www.fedvid.com/siena)