Sci-fi film car and set designer Syd Mead
Vehicle designer turned ‘visual futurist’, famous for cars and machines in the films Blade Runner, Tron and more
A PRODIGIOUS talent for drawing combined with an obsession with the future led to Syd Mead’s extraordinary ability to turn inner visions into fabulously exotic artwork. Born in 1933, the son of a Baptist preacher in St Paul, Minnesota, he was soon on the move as his peripatetic father spread the word of God. It’s said that he started drawing at the age of three, and he was an accomplished draughtsman by the time he graduated from the Colorado Springs High School in 1951. Army service took him to Okinawa, Japan, from 1953 to ’56, after which he followed his calling and enrolled in the Art Center School in Los Angeles (now the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena). He excelled.
Perhaps not surprisingly, on graduation in 1959 he was snapped up by Ford’s Advanced Styling Studio, where young designers were encouraged to unleash their imaginations while exploring ideas for cars of the future. It was the height of the show-car boom, with Ford and GM slogging it out and producing ever-more outrageous and impractical designs: Ford never quite cracked its nuclear-powered pick-up! Anong the projects that Mead worked on, alongside studio head Alex Tremulis, was the two-wheeled, gyroscopically balanced Gyron, a full-size mock-up of which was first shown at the 1961 Detroit Auto Show. He also worked on a wedge-shaped Ford Ranger II pick-up, which featured an extendable cab to convert it into a four-seater.
Mead left Ford after two years, lured away by US Steel to illustrate a series of lavishly produced books showcasing the potential of steel and stuffed with Syd’s concepts of future vehicles, some clearly based on his work for Ford. His career path set, Mead described himself as a ‘visual futurist’, stating that science fiction was simply ‘reality ahead of schedule’. In 1970 he opened an office in Detroit, Syd Mead Inc, to provide renderings and product design for an ever-expanding roster of prestigious clients, including Dutch electronics giant Philips, a collaboration that lasted for 12 years.
In 1975, courtesy of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine, he created the ultimate American dream machine when he designed the Playboy land yacht: an unashamed passion wagon designed for one purpose only. However, his luxurious six-wheeled motorised ‘bachelor pad’ incorporated ideas that only now are being realised. Behind its immense, sharply pointed wedge of a windscreen (based on the design of the earlier Ranger II) was an array of electronic driver aids, including a self-drive mode (presumably activated when the bachelor was otherwise engaged) that relied on a battery of cameras and infrared sensors for night driving.
It’s easy to see why big corporations sought Mead’s work, because his vision of the future was unrelentingly optimistic, a utopia bathed in sunlight where the cities were clean, sharpedged and pollution-free and the citizens were lithe and beautiful. A stunning out-of-character contrast to this vision occurred when he was engaged by Ridley Scott to visualise the setting for Blade Runner.
Hollywood first tapped Mead’s imagination in 1979 when he created the V’Ger planet killer for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Shortly after, he was hired for a few days’ work in the preproduction stage of Blade Runner – and then spent nine months creating Scott’s much darker dystopian vision of a future Los Angeles. Notable among his contributions were the Spinner levitating cars and the Voight-Kampff machine, a futuristic polygraph used for determining whether a suspect is a replicant or not. Mead was suddenly one of the foremost visualisers for sci-fi movies and an impressive list swelled his CV, among them Tron (set in a world created inside a computer; he designed the aircraft carrier, tank and two-wheeled
‘light cycle’), Short Circuit, Aliens, Time Cop, Johnny Mnemonic, Mission Impossible 3, Elysium, and in 2017, at the age of 84, the Blade Runner sequel, Blade Runner 2049.
Elon Musk, a fan, said it was Mead’s designs for Blade Runner that inspired the Tesla Cybertruck, a hard-edged, wedge-shaped, electric-powered pick-up. It is for his work on
Blade Runner that Mead became best known, yet transportation design remained his first love. He achieved legendary status among designers and was in constant demand as a speaker, giving erudite lectures about his work and future developments to design-orientated audiences around the world.
Describing his work as ‘supersonic baroque’, Mead worked primarily in gouache, a form of quick-drying opaque water-colour paint, and he liked to paint and draw standing up, explaining that as he drew from the shoulder he needed the freedom of movement it gave him and the ability to pivot.
Mead had been suffering long-term from lymphoma and announced his retirement in 2019, marking the end of a 60-year career. He died three months later at his Pasadena home, surrounded by Christmas decorations. His husband, business manager and partner of 36 years reported that his last words were: ‘I’m done here. They’re coming to take me back.’ We can only hope that ‘they’ came from his utopian world rather than that of