Urban Art Blog

If you love retro-futurism you’re probably still a little disappointed that none of it has arrived quite yet, sure we’ve got cellphones and space travel’s getting cheaper (relatively speaking… if you’re a billionaire). There are plenty of places to get your retro-futurist fix online, but for those who’ve no idea what I’m going on about here’s what Wikipedia has to say on the subject:

“…a trend in the creative arts showing the influence of depictions of the future produced prior to about 1960. Characterized by a blend of old-fashioned retro styles with futuristic technology, retro-futurism explores the themes of tension between past and future, and between the alienating and empowering effects of technology. Primarily reflected in artistic creations and modified technologies that realize the imagined artefacts of its parallel reality, retro-futurism has also manifested in the worlds of fashion, architecture, literature and film.”

Anyway here’s a few places to travel among the stars or be enslaved by technological dystopias of the far off and highly kitsch future. That is if we’d invented time travel in the 1950s and exported all that dapper and swanky design ethic to future generations of the far off and beyond…

Paelo-Future is a superb retro-futurist blog that specialises in all things imagined from the last century for what would have probably have been the next. There are some really really old school examples here, in fact at times their finds verge on Steam Punk, but hey the more the merrier.

Hilarious… the skyscrapers might be here but the biplanes are long gone, not quite the most imaginative example, but pretty impressive when you consider someone was probably drawing this one with a quill pen in a wooden hut (only joking).

Retro Futurismus is a German site (available in English) that features some of the greatest German retro futurist illustrators including:

• Klaus Bürgle
• Erik Theodor Lässig
• Kurt Röschl
• Eberhard Binder-Staßfurt
• H.u.B. von Römer
• Günter Radtke
• Helmuth Ellgaard
• Heinz Hähnel

Städte & Verkehr

Here’s a few more from the Germans…

You can read a great post on German and contemporary retro-futurism including more pics like these at www.colourlovers.com.

Syd Mead was a favourite for magazines like Playboy in the 1970s, nope it wasn’t all boobs and bums back then, they even had articles.

'WonderWall' concept painting for Playboy, 1971 - Syd Mead

Interface Series- Residential City Modules - Syd Mead

Another true legend of retro-futurism has to be Robert McCall who worked on many of the sets for 2001: A Space Odyssey. as well as plenty of other sci-fi movies and even murals for NASA.

If you’d like to see some examples of contemporary retro-futurism check out this post at Spoongraphics.

Hannibal Chew

Sakke Sioni

Finally if you really want to explore the retro-futurist world get on over to this retro-future forum where a whole load of fans of the genre share retro future images to their hearts content ;)