Most people who couldn’t name Syd Mead have still spent a good part of their lives inside his head. The Spinner dropping through the smog in Blade Runner. The light cycles in Tron. The hardware in Aliens, which looks like it was built by people with a job to do. If you picture the future as a place with sleek vehicles, wet streets and machines that look engineered rather than dreamed up, you are picturing something he painted first.
He was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1933, the son of a Baptist minister who read him Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon pulps. He graduated from Art Center in Los Angeles in 1959 with distinction and went straight into Ford’s Advanced Design Studio, which he left after two years. What came next is the part that gets skipped. He illustrated future-themed catalogues and books for industrial clients, U.S. Steel above all. Steel companies are not an obvious place to start a career in the imaginary, but the commission produced megastructures, earth movers, a space colony under construction and a concept car, all rendered in gouache with the tidiness of a technical drawing.
In 1970 he started Syd Mead, Inc. and spent much of the decade producing hundreds of concepts for Philips in Eindhoven. By then his work was already out in the world in a way he probably hadn’t planned. George Lucas and Joe Johnston based the AT-AT on one of his U.S. Steel paintings, so a catalogue illustration ended up walking across Hoth before Mead had worked on a single film.
The films came in 1979 with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, where he conceived V’Ger, and then two at once. He was hired on Blade Runner to design the vehicles, and Ridley Scott’s brief for the Spinner was that it should be anything other than a rotor or folding wings. Mead’s habit was to paint the surroundings of whatever he designed, and the backgrounds impressed Scott enough that he was kept on for the look of the whole film. Streets, Deckard’s apartment, the Voight-Kampff machine. He is billed as “visual futurist”, a title that sounds invented until you look at the result. While Blade Runner was in pre-production, Tron’s producer rang, and he moved between the two films, designing the light cycles, tanks and Sark’s carrier, then going back to finish matte work on Blade Runner. The Tron light cycles were simplified for the computer graphics of the day. He got another go at them in 2003, designing the cycle for the Tron 2.0 game.
The method is what made it hold together. He said the idea supersedes technique, and his work never looked like a cool object in a void. It looked like a solution to a problem, in a place that had been thought through. One book on his film art describes his Blade Runner work as industrial design in reverse. The Spinner’s cockpit had a display giving navigation information for the city, in a decade when navigation meant a folded map. Plausibility did the work that spectacle usually does.
Then the credits kept coming. Aliens and 2010, Johnny 5 in Short Circuit, fifty episodes of Turn A Gundam, mask designs for Mission: Impossible III, Elysium, Tomorrowland, Blade Runner 2049. Denis Villeneuve wrote that only Mead could legitimately create the look of Las Vegas for that film. In 2015 he even did a skin for the AUG in Counter-Strike, and in 1998 he designed a rocket ship for a proposed Simpsons spin-off that turned into Futurama. There is no obvious category for a career like that.
The odd part is that the man most associated with rain-soaked dystopia didn’t draw dystopias. People who saw his recent exhibition were struck by how hopeful the work is, and the curators and his husband Roger Servick describe an optimist. His future is glossy, sensual and populated, and nothing in it is collapsing. Blade Runner’s decay came from Scott’s direction and the budget. Mead’s own version is a place you would want to arrive at.
Which is where retrofuturism comes in, because that is how it reads now. Chrome, gouache and the confidence of the 1970s and 80s belong to a future that never showed up on schedule. But the visual grammar, the vehicles, the megastructures, the lit-from-within cities, is still what a huge part of the genre runs on, including most of what gets covered on this blog. He called science fiction “reality ahead of schedule”, and some of it did turn up, only never looking as good.
He retired in September 2019 and died at home in Pasadena that December, aged 86, after three years of lymphoma. According to his official timeline, his last words were “I am done here. They’re coming to take me back.” His estate is keeping the work moving. Future Pastime opened this week at the Transamerica Pyramid Annex in San Francisco and runs until December 17, LACMA has him in a show on the home of the future, and Philips is opening an exhibition in Eindhoven on the 17th.
I write a lot here about Japanese cyberpunk, and it took me this long to get round to an American painter who kept getting hired by Japan. Turn A Gundam, Yamato 2520, a six-storey laser arena in Shibuya. The future he painted never arrived on schedule. I keep waiting.
