The Fredösphere

Today we escape to the future of yesterday:  here are some beautiful examples of cover and poster art from the history of tomorrow.  You may want to add these to your Amazon wish list.

After seeing The Incredibles last weekend, I had to ask myself, why can't the real world be designed so beautifully?  Well, for one thing, being a work of CG animation, everything in the environment was designed by a single team -- in the real world, no one gets that kind of control.  (Although in situations that come close, the results are often monstrous -- think Chandigarh and Brasilia.)  Movie makers are also free from small commercial considerations like how much will it cost to build this house and will it stand up and will mounting kitchen cabinet doors on an angle make them impossible to open and can we find any customers willing to live in this thing?

Oh, it also helps that Pixar's design team has talent and experience up the kazoo, as a former boss of mine was wont to say.

Metropolismag.com has an morbidly fascinating article on "Superstudio."  They were a bunch of hyper-radical anti-architects.  The whole bunch sounds like people who needed to breathe into a paper bag, but hey, I suppose Italy of the 1960s was a tough place for ambitious kids just entering the job market. Because almost nothing they designed was ever realized, they are mainly known for their stunning, bizarre images:

One of the 1971 "Twelve Ideal Cities," City of Hemispheres depicts a crystal lake comprised of more than ten million sarcophagi, the occupants kept alive by sophisticated technology. While their bodies lie forever prone, they have control over the flying hemispheres, through which they are fed sensory stimuli.

And one of them is named Neo and looks a lot like Keanu Reeves.