Pages

Thursday, August 5, 2021

The Future in the Past


Star Trek: Designing the Final Frontier by Dan Chavkin and Brian McGuire came out this week. It catalogs the use of Mid-Century Modern and Brutalist artifacts (furniture, decorative elements, household items, and architecture) but informed and served as the building blocks of the future as presented in Star Trek the original series.

The authors go season by season, detailing the items of Mid-century design that appear on screen. Costuming is not covered really, presumably because there is already a book on the costume design of Star Trek. in between the season by season rundown, their are short chapters on various topics like architecture, matte paintings, and Brutalism.

The only flaw I find in the book is that it is all too short. A mere 166 pages!



1 comment:

  1. Very cool. I suspect there's probably a strong link between these designs, particularly the Trek computer displays, and real-world designs that came out of IBM (who employed top designers, like the Eames).

    ReplyDelete