My Goldmine
My Goldmine - Willem van den Hoed
“Wait a minute, Doc. Ah... Are you telling me you built a time machine... out of a DeLorean?” You travel through time by car. In “Back to the Future”, Marty McFly drives a DeLorean from 1985 back to 1955, a time when cars looked like streamlined cream cakes and you could pick up your driving licence for free at the post office on your sixteenth birthday. I would love to have been a teenager in the America of that era, taking Lorraine to the drive-in cinema in dad’s Buick and featuring in ‘Hot Shot Eastbound’, O. Winston Link’s famous photo from 1956.
In 1961, Syd Mead – then 28 years old – bought a 1956 Mercedes 300SL GullWing Coupe and created his first books for U.S. Steel. Syd Mead makes futuristic drawings and he loves cars. With legendary accuracy, he designs, directs and depicts worlds that are indisputably futuristic (cars hover and cities resemble enormous domestic appliances) while at the same time radiating the infectious optimism of America in the ‘fifties and ‘sixties. A hi-tech future is combined with the now vanished American Dream. In his pictures, the grey world of today is pleasantly absent! In the course of his career, he has received commissions from businesses such as the Ford Motor Company, U.S. Steel and Sony to depict the future of these companies’ products. For Philips, he visualised possible future methods for illuminating motorways. He worked together with Raymond Loewy in Paris and New York, but Mead is probably most famous for his design work for the film Bladerunner (1982).
1987 saw the appearance of Sentinel II, containing an overview of his work. It is primarily a book of illustrations. Mead did append explanatory text to the hundred or more images, from which it becomes apparent that the vehicles and machines also have a well thought-out functionality, but I personally never considered that very important. For me, the fantastic images are the important thing.
Mead was a member of the American Society of Architectural Perspectivists (ASAP). A perspectivist aims to record spatial representations on a flat plane. Albrecht Dürer was a 16th-century perspectivist. He demonstrated the technique in a number of illustrative woodcuts. One of the most famous depicts a lute on a table; the perspective is projected onto the intervening tableau via a string attached to a hook on the wall. Clever stuff! Mead, however, does not need a string to draw the multi-faceted worlds of his imagination. As he draws, he effortlessly constructs cylindrical cities, teardrop-shaped spaceships and fantasy pets. The 3-dimensional meaning of his 2-dimensional lines is always utterly believable. And, when the lines have been laid down and Mead proceeds to colour in the drawing, he has total control over the representation of the materials that make up his imaginary world.
I will use the book’s cover illustration to explain what I find so impressive. We see a glistening vehicle that has just landed on a stone floor. The sun (or some similar star) shines down, and the vehicle casts a shadow, depriving part of the floor of direct sunlight. In addition, the floor reflects the vehicle and the console on the right of the picture. The floor therefore reflects either a dark object in the foreground or the air. The 2x2 matrix provides Mead with four reasonably diverse basic paint colours for the stone, from warm, light yellow (direct sunlight, no reflected object) to dark brown/grey (no direct sunlight, but a reflected dark object). The four colours touch on the right side of the picture, like an elegant junction where four bordering countries meet, but we shall consciously ignore this spot. The dominant impression is of a semi-reflective travertine, partly illuminated by the sun. We interpret the four colours as natural stone without hesitation. For someone like me, an architect of drawn worlds, Mead’s work is essential study material.
But then we have to consider a third aspect of his work as a master artist. Syd Mead paints cinematic scenes that are actually always inviting. He is a master in handling the lighting of the décors: small, comfortable, glowing terraces set amidst rough, dark mountain landscapes; or glossy, sunlit, luxurious motorway landscapes. Even when things go wrong and a machine crash-lands, the scene still looks attractive, almost safe and secure. A young, blonde woman wearing a torn dress sits in her wrecked craft. There has obviously been an accident, but the viewer’s first instinct is to take a bottle of champagne and a dozen oysters and sit beside her to enjoy the breathtaking, snowy panorama.
And then it is time for the ‘Enchantment under the Sea’ ball. In the foreground the Gran Turismos, made of silver and Chinese lacquer, drive along a light-emitting, perspex boulevard. Bulbous halls, from which shines a warm, yellow-orange light, float in enormous, deep blue caves. There are holographic projections of exotic dancers and the people drink volatile beverages from closable chalices. I put on my tuxedo, start the DeLorean and hope that I will arrive on time.
(Translation: Christopher Smith)
Mini-bio: Willem van den Hoed (b. 1965) is an architect, draughtsman and photographer. He has received a number of prizes from the ASAP for his architectural drawings.
Photo: DCN
The article was written for “Items” (2007-2) a Dutch Design magazine. In each issue of Items a designer is asked to write about the book that they consider to be their “goldmine”
