Form Follows Fiction: A Brief History of Spaceship Design

If Modernism had it that Form follows Function, then how do you design something that has an imaginary function? If a reductive functionalism denies the role of culture in shaping the objects we design, then do objects with no function represent a kind of pure form of culture? Do they represent our dreams and fears somehow more purely, because the pragmatics and restrictions of 'real' design have been removed?

In the 1950's spaceships were rocket shaped and came in bright zingy colours. They zoomed purposefully off into space, styled to suggest a thrusting ambition. UFO's, by contrast were designed by aliens and therefore, for some reason, round. This abstract styling made them ambiguous vehicles, never clearly heading anywhere or with any clear purpose. Their threat was suggested not through aggresive styling but through their mute indifference.

In the late '60's and 70's all spaceships were white, styled like orbiting laboraties, with doors that slid silently open and endless corridors that stretched out like an existential maze. Then, in the 1980's, they became beige like early PC's, their flickering green MS Dos screens representing, perversely, a step back from the blinking colours of the '60's. Space became not a new frontier but a new source of dread, with spaceships full of leaking pipes and slowly failing technology. Today (an oxymoron in science fiction, but still) they seem to have taken on the baroque manifestations of ancient cities, flying pyramids of the sun and the moon, covered in vein like hieroglyphics and of vast planet-like scale. They are, perhaps, something to do with ancient wisdom, a distant sense of civilisation our technology has alienated us from.

The following is a brief, visual and highly partial history of spaceship design.

Municipal Analogue Shuffle Mode

The other day I went to the library. Actually I have been going to libraries a lot recently for professional reasons, but the other day I went to my local one and joined, on the evidence of an unpaid mobile phone bill, and walked back out again with 13 CD’s.

Once upon a time everyone went to the library. This was before they routinely shuffled a deck of twenty personal credit cards and had the illusory spending power of a small country. If you look at photos of, say, London in the 1960’s, the age range of cars on the street is probably around twenty years. If you looked at one now it would be three or four. Going to the library flies in the face of the logic of 21st century capitalism. The veins of consumer spending are so finely spread and run so deep that an institution not dedicated to it is like an archaic ruin, or a preserved fossil. It does funny things to your choices too.

Freed from the restrictions of having to use your own financial resources the mind can run rampant, unfettered by Added Interest on New Purchases, through lush musical pastures of delirious possibility. Constrained instead by Hackney Council’s limited spending capabilities and the arbitrary collective taste of the council employees charged with buying up what looks like the bits of Dalston Oxfam Shop not already featured, the librarie's CD collection is a bracingly random cross section through popular culture.

Basically you have to shelve any idea of going in to try to find something specific. It doesn’t work like that. Which is just as well for me as going into a music store (physical or digital) induces instant amnesia anyway. So it’s a lottery but one where a limited jackpot win awaits you every time. Freed from the need to be fashionable, niche, retro or cheap, freed in fact from almost any contemporary determinant of value, the library represents a social utopia of taste.

This is the opposite of personalised radio, which works on the basis that you might never have to hear anything that doesn’t already sound like something you have. It represents the endless refining of niche taste till your ears hurt with the over-familiarity and your brain folds in on itself. Unfortunately, I can’t get Xfm’s Personalised Radio to work on my mac, so I’m not quite sure how refined it can get.

It may be possible for instance to listen exclusively to Songs Featuring Excellent Voice Distortion (sample playlist: Kylie Minogue Put Yourself In My Place, Cher I believe, Sally Shapiro He Keeps Me Alive, ELO Mr Blue Sky) or Songs About Outer Space (The Beloved’s lost classic Outer Spaceman, The Carpenter’s Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Most Extraordinary Craft, Chris De Burgh’s A Spaceman Came Travelling) and nothing else. Or indeed Taylor Parke's Right Wing Rock. Ever. So, the choice is: the digital precision or refining your music taste into an ad campaign for the contents of your own head, or the random joys of municipal shuffle mode.

Scopic Regimes

Here’s a strange congruence of interests. Patrick Wright’s book The Village That Died For England describes the requisitioning by the British Army of Tyneham, a small village in Dorset. The village was used initially for practice in advance of the Allied invasion of Europe and lies within large tracts of MOD land where full scale war games are still played out. Although only officially ‘borrowed’ from the villagers, Tyneham has never been given back.

Wright’s book is about much more than just Tyneham, though, which he uses as a jumping off point for a meditation on English rural radicalism, pastoralism, the Picturesque, the writer Mary Butts and a whole host of other eccentrics, oddballs, political extremists, aristocrats and army flunkies. Making an unexpected cameo appearance at one point are various members of the Archigram group who set architecture student projects there when teaching at the AA in the 1970’s. Coming across like an only slightly less absurd version of Withnail and I, David Greene and Warren Chalk buzz around the place with their long haired prodigies (including young Will Alsop) in clapped out vehicles and stride into local boozers ordering quadruple whiskies.

Archigram’s interest in the dematerialisation of architecture and with landscape as a kind of serviced amenity finds an odd parallel in the controlled territories of MOD land, where vast targets sit in the landscape like giant Pop Art sculptures, and tanks roam the planes like miniature walking cities.

The controlled and territorialized landscape of military manoeuvres is like an apocalyptic version of the English taste for the picturesque. Here an enthusiasm for controlling and mapping out large areas of landscape, the scopic control required by the battleground general, is not so far from Capability Brown’s manipulations of nature for the enjoyment of wealthy landowners. Instead of Gothic follies romantically consumed with Ivy, MOD land leaves the bombed out fragments of places like Tyneham.

Gillian Darley describes in her book Villages of Vision, the vogue for wealthy landowners in the 18th century to remove unsightly houses and dwellings that lay in the way of their view of the countryside. Frequently, their country houses would end up some miles away from the re-positioned village, with only the church for company as a reminder of where the village had once been. Sometimes bits of the cottages would be retained as romantic ruins, evacuated and aestheticised according to the picturesque tastes of the upper classes. Slowly, rights of way might be opened up back across the landowners estate to encourage ruddy faced peasants to walk across like a theatrical troupe of unpaid extras. All this was according to the picturesque conventions landscape designers such as Brown and Humphrey Repton and borrowed from the paintings of Claude Lorrain where simple peasants lolled under trees and worked in arcadian splendour. The ha-ha, a deep ditch separating the landowners immediate garden from the rest of his land, allowed a seemingly endless sweep of the countryside to be co-opted into the experience, whilst controlling the movements of peasants and animals lest they stray too close.

For a persuasive but slightly terrifying exploration of the idea of the aestheticisation of the landscape of war, read Jeff Wall’s essay Dan Graham's Kammerspiel, or at least the bit on American architectural legend Philip Johnson. Wall conducts a forensic examination of Johnson’s notorious involvement in neo-fascist organisations whilst at university in the 1930’s and, in particular, his trip to Europe as a reporter following the German invasion of Poland in 1938. Wall recounts Johnson’s slavering descriptions of the burnt out wreckages of Polish villages, the smouldering remains where most of the houses had been exhumed by fire, leaving only the brick foundations and the odd chimney standing. Wall then makes a leap to an astounding reading of Johnson’s famous Glass House in Connecticut. Here, the house itself is dematerialised by its glass walls, so that the only non-transparent elements are the low brick walls on which the glass sits and the circular brick tower containing the bathroom and the fireplace. Walls’ audacious analogy suggests that Johnson deliberately evoked the burnt out houses he had seen in his youth following the blitzkrieg, and recreated them in the bucolic picturesque landscape of his New Canaan estate.