These futures, so wonderfully pursued in color and line, repeated in the Sunday full-page spreads, collided with the future actually built in the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, and again in New York in 1939. I walked through those fairs, brimming with tears of joy, glad to be inside the covers of Amazing Stories at last, closeted with illustrations come to life and reared to touch the sky and the soul. When the two fairs were torn down, part of my heart fell with them. The future was suddenly sunk and lost. My heart would break if it never returned.
I, like others aged twelve, built the future out of papier-mâché in my backyard, in order to guarantee its return, and repeated the stuff in my first stories. As I grew into my twenties I knew that if I wrote long enough and hard enough and willed the future to return, one day it would.
So the world we live in today is the direct result, I think, of the artwork, the illustrations, and the architecture of only-yesterday’s artists, who influenced films and comic strips as well as young writers and budding scientists.
If you flip back through the years 1905 to 1915 you will find the incredible cities, the impossible architecture of Little Nemo, as drawn by one of the greatest cartoon illustrators of the century, Winsor McCay.
Simultaneously, in France, the magician-become-cinema illusionist George Melies was popping rabbit films out of hats, full of Verne/Wells imagery, alive with architecture, impossible beasts, moon landscapes, and a pomegranate imagination that refused to sit still. If Melies influenced McCay or if McCay influenced Melies, I do not know. They are twins, racing down the same genetic track, so devastatingly full of the life-force that they knock everyone head over heels before them.
The histories of cinema and comic strips parallel each other on similar rail tracks, speeding up on through our century, rushing over mile-high viaducts, racing toward our elusive tomorrows.
The combination of all these metaphorical art forms, comic strips, magazine covers, magical films of the early twentieth century, and the World’s Fairs in between, have produced the architectural science fiction films of the last twenty years.
Architectural science fiction films?
I use the description because these films have rebuilt our concepts of the future. They are the manifestations of the words of science fiction and the architecture of our dreams.
2001 for starters. Next the big artillery that knocked us flat out: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and the charming Star Trek II, III and IV.
Long before them, there were Metropolis and Things to Come, echoing and presaging the wild fancies of Frank Lloyd Wright and the unrealized blueprints of Norman Bel Geddes.
The unbuilt visions of lost architectural genius have at last been raised from the graveyard sands and reared on 50-foot-high and 90-foot-wide screens by today’s production designers and science fiction illustrators.
It was the cities we went to see.
Let us face it: In the final moments of Close Encounters, that is not—I repeat, not—a Mother Ship that drifts down from the universe. It is an entire country, a land put up in a massive architectural pod, so irresistible that, in hearing its five Pied Piper notes played again and again, the children of the world, myself included, rushed across the tarmac in our minds to get aboard and go away forever.
Such is the pull of futures riveted together as cities that pretend to be ships.
In The Empire Strikes Back, more cities, more architecture. What is the Emerald City doing, suspended on its own platform in a weird skyscraper, waiting for our seekers?
And, again…
Why do we go back to see 2001 over and over and over? Surely not for its one-track acting and baffling finale. We return to it because the very possibility of its interpretations frees us to carom off into the greatest of all architecture: the universe itself.
Who will ever forget their first cinematic trip into the unknown universe? The first sighting of that immense city-ship adrift to Strauss waltzes on the first night of viewing 2001?
Or that first thunderous explosion of a Star Wars rocket blasting across the stars? The night I heard it, a thousand people gasped with shock, knocked in the pits of their stomachs. The glad cry that followed the shock was like the city of a thousand babes slapped into life: pure joy at the sound of the future.
I am reminded of an article I wrote for a major magazine a few years back. The magazine hated the aesthetic concept of my article so much that they paid me off and trashed the piece. What had I said that knocked their wigs askew?
I simply pointed out that science fiction and science fiction art were revolutionizing the world of the museum, the gallery, the concert hall, the cinema, and all or most of fiction.
The cultural impact of your average science fiction film made kids wandering into art galleries wonder where all the metaphors were. They found instead drip-dry, cross-hatched, and empty canvases, bereft of any romance, poetry, image, or so much as one half of a dog-eared haiku symbol. If the cinema screens could flood their minds with such vivid portraits of imagined dreams, why not the art galleries?
From the imaginative film came the inevitable bleed-over and discovery of such illustrators as Rackham, Dulac, Grandville, Dore and the Victorian pre-Raphaelite painters. All because kids ran off to 2001 and fell from a thousand-story building, into the past as well as the future.
So the new-old clichés of the abstract and super-abstract revolution were cut across at their nonexistent knees by a riot of heretofore uninformed teenaged art critics who demanded story, symbol, and the reinvention of tale telling.
What fragmented the art galleries soon knocked a few orchestra conductors off their podiums. What started as a hum-along with the Strausses through two hours of 2001 prolonged itself into science fictional symphonies with Berlioz, Vivaldi, and a half-dozen others. The kids in their bright ignorance stumbled out of John Williams’ score for Star Wars into The Four Seasons and Symphonie Fantastique. One helluva way, the aesthetes protested, to be educated to their finer impulse.
What, after all, did these damn-fool kids know about art?
Almost, you might say, everything.
They knew that life without image or metaphor is empty and meaningless. Hell, they said, you can learn from the Bible. Witness Daniel in that old lions’ den. Once the cage doors slam and lions roar, you never forget that, do you? Well, then, in this age of machines that embody all the metaphors of man’s dreaming in the last one hundred years, how come the galleries are empty of concept, vacuumed free of one lint-thread of idea, long lost from dream? You do not go to visit an elevator shaft with no elevator in it, do you? Better one bottomed out in trash, if necessary, as long as you, in the finale, are lifted.
Well, if I have beaten the dead thoat a dozen times too many, forgive. Not all of our teachers, our intellectuals, our movers and shakers, have yet discovered that this is the greatest age of metaphor, because the metaphors have peeled off the canvases, marched out of the haunted World’s Fair grounds, leaped out of the comic strips, and unreeled themselves from cinema screens and computer tapes to become our whole existences, our lives, our further dreams. The artistic haiku of just the other morning has become the logarithm written to displace the astrological houses above us.
If educators and parents only truly understood, our children today are all quasars, galaxies, black holes, laser discs, and rocket-submarines built to submerge and swim in Jupiter’s soups. The architecture of the future is the substance of their dreams, fed by some of the best-wishing artists, authors, and architects.