July 29, 2004
Looking Back at Futuristic Transportation
Berkeley has a virtual gallery of futuristic tranportation schemes that were proposed in the past. This is a really wild exhibit, as there are so many ideas that seemed so full of promise at the time. It really is worth the time to take a look.
Posted by elkaim at July 29, 2004 5:03 PMWhen we see a drawing of a transportation futuristic, we instinctively know that’s what it is. But what do jetpacks, rolling boats and these other endeavors have in common? With few exceptions, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s visions of helicopters and airplanes, the futuristics are the product of the Industrial and post-Industrial Age, a time when the pace of technological change rapidly accelerated and people began dreaming about the future in new ways.
The futuristics also all involve fairly radical ideas, from new propulsion systems to novel use of materials to extreme hybrids of existing forms. The designs seen in this exhibit have not been commercial successes. Some fail on the technical side (some spectacularly so), while others never achieve economic viability.
This exhibit examines some of the efforts to address transportation needs in ways that didn’t quite get off the ground literally or figuratively. Are the designers simply ahead of their time? Are the failures attributable to an infrastructure that never anticipated such a development? Was there ultimately no way to make the new idea work financially?