Roots of SF/F design - Arisia 2013

After the Con

Well, I'm back from Arisia 2013. Alas, when the final schedule came out there was not paper modeling workshop so maybe next year. I did get to go one a panel that was lots of fun, the topic being the roots of SF/F design. The idea has been bubbling around in the brainstorm forum I think for a couple of years now.  The fundamental point is that there is a look for these things. Visually speaking, there is design style for the portrayal of fantasy art, often reflecting art noveau, celtic, or pre-raphaelite aesthetics. Similarly the portrayal of the future often follows certain aesthetics, although these are more closely tied to contemporary aesthetics in modernist (or post-modernist) design.
     The moderator for the panel was Frank Wu who was ebullient at various times as we hit imagery and topics near and dear to his heart (and, I have to grudgingly admit, perhaps overly indulged me -  Sorry). Also on the panel were the artists Thomas Nackid and Mercy E. Van Vlack.

What was covered

The Arts and Crafts movement is in some ways the mother to all. At the fantasy end, the arts and crafts movement looked to older traditions dating back to the middle ages for design patterns such as Celtic traditions and folk art. This was a reaction to then contemporary mass produced consumer products which were created without style or aesthetic, but only with an eye to efficiency. As such, the movement was opposed to machine manufacturing and mass production. It embraced the craftsman as the source of well made products. It also embraced a kind of honesty in material. There is, in a sense, a reflection of the material and an acceptance of what is an artistic decorative interpretation of the subject, not the subject itself. Curiously this abstraction is not that dissimilar to the more dramatic abstractions of the early 20th century. The abstraction of forms and patterns leads to an appreciation of the lines of these structures as a design pattern itself and is reflected in the more austere forms of the late arts and crafts period seen in the works of architects such as Charles Rennie McKintosh and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Aelita: Queen of Mars

      Futurism was discussed next and its relative Constructivism (which I still feel is aesthetically very similar if politically rather contrary). Here the references to SF come in some of the first films such as Aelita and Metropolis.

      Art Deco which has its roots in the developments of the Arts and Crafts as well as Art Noveau movements as we entered the 20s. The name itself is derivative from the Arts and Decorative Arts Exposition of Paris in 1925. Unlike the older movements it embraced the industrial age and new materials and techniques such as plastic.

"Just Imagine" rocketship

     Of course, the style most apparent from this movement in science fiction was "Streamline Moderne" which focused everything into capturing speed and movement, something that was a key aspect of the earlier work by futurists and constructivists as well as cubists. Designers Raymond Loewy and Norman Bel Geddes are remembered as some of the most influential designers of this period.

Post War

The International Style which would become the dominant design style of what was considered "modern" after the war has its roots in the Bauhaus design school styles of the 1920s. After Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis and its faculty dispersed,  staff and alumni were not surprisingly in a position to highly influence design in the United States and Europe after the war. Curiously, it is a style that is not the most dominant outside of a few movies and popular science imagery. We speculated as to the why, but nothing conclusive could be said outside of the fact that the very ubiquity of the style made it somehow insufficiently foreign to be a "futuristic" style for speculative imagery.

The view of the future, at least in the United States seems to have been captured by what is called Googie architecture (just love that name). Googie was an outgrowth of Streamline Moderne, or streamlining on steroids. The name comes from a now non-existent coffee shop in LA, but it is epitomized by the look of some of the more outlandish architecture in LA and Miami. For those who still don't know, it is the look of The Jetsons. Curiously, similar looking structures done in "Post-Modernist" styles such as the TWA terminal at JFK, or Brasilia are not termed "Googie" as a rule, but the aesthetic seems very similar, if more subdued. Pictures of Le Corbusier's church at Ronchamp seems to encapsulate the key Googie elements of the chevron and the slanted roof.

Is there still a look?

That's an interesting question. In researching this topic I noted that there is generally not a "futuristic" look to contemporary SF since Star Trek really. Much of the imagery keeps a lot of the common design elements of everyday life or look for a style that is part of an iconic cultural niche such as the film noir look of Gattaca. An example of this "non-futuristic" future is "AI", which while containing futuristic imagery, seems comfortable in presenting a good deal of the future as a really nice contemporary suburb.

Material for the future

I don't know if Arisia would be willing to revisit the topic next year,  although my wife thinks we would have gotten more people if we had not coincided with Roger Dean's art tour. I would love to do this again with a little more time spent on the fantasy end of design. Actually I think there is material in exploring the apparent dichotomy of organic styles such as Art Noveau for fantasy and the more austere Bauhaus or Atom Punk Googie style science fiction.  It's as if fantasy is organic, biological, hands-on, and meditative, whereas SF is more mechanical, manufactured, and pasteurized.

The other thing that I think would be worthwhile is looking at how World Fairs and International Expositions really shaped what the popular vision of the future would be like. This may go back as far as H.G. Wells vision of a city under glass from memories of the Great London Exposition and the Crystal Palace, but there are also the famous Futurama halls of the New York Expos of '38 and '64.

Refs

     I have re-edited this post soon to update links and imagery, but since back from Boskone and South America (another story). Here is a link to the PDF of the slides that I used for this panel. As a general rule, Wikipedia is still a great starting point for any of these things.

     Some things I looked into that provided information about the Paris exposition of 1925 are now on the www archive (http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.retropolis.net/exposition/), but sometimes missed is Frederick Kiesler's City in Space installation which does seem to presage the look of the International modernist style that would predominate the post-war world. Basically, not everything there was art deco.

     As I mentioned, World Expos are a big part of the look of the future. The ExpoMuseum provides a certain amount of information on many of these exhibitions.

     Some additional links would be David Szondy's "Tales of Future Past" as well as detailed information on the design look of "Space 1999" at www.space1999.net sollarium (link dead at time of posting, will have to see if it comes back). There's also a lengthy article at Wordpress on Kubrick's 2001 design style: Designing the Future.