That was a double-sided sword with its potential for total destruction, also presented as the cure-all for energy needs, with nuclear power.
“We can contrast that with the Atomic Age. “At the time of Sputnik and shortly thereafter, there was a tremendous shift in America’s concern with falling behind, a shift toward science and technology on a broad scale,” McGee says.
He has organized the exhibition into seven displays - Space, Home, Work, Play, A-V, Trek, and Pop Psyche - setting them in the context of the period’s radical social change. The Space Age appealed for its nostalgic tug (“I grew up in it,” he says) and conceptual depth. McGee, who has a background in film and media, discovered the power of design in the 1980s when he lived in Tokyo. All design aspires to be timeless, but these objects are practically multidimensional. One piece of furniture managed to encompass an imagined future that never was, the reality of the time that gave birth to it, and the real “future” in which it continues to exist.Ītemporality might be one of the most appealing and confounding elements of Space Age. Kirk’s Bay Area apartment in 1982, the creators of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan used a President chair to convey contemporary luxury in the 23rd century along with Kirk’s love of antiques. The 1968 lounge chair known as The President, from Danish architect and industrial designer Steen Østergaard, might have graced a high-style home, as it did Captain James T. A 1970 Videosphere cathode-ray tube television brought the look of Armstrong’s helmet into the living room. Atop a black triangular base dotted with stars, a rocket plume curves upward - ideals of speed and ambition captured in Lucite and chrome. There’s a sculpture that could have been a trophy for a NASA engineer. In the Space Age, anything was possible, and the fantastic became domestic. Optimism verges on giddiness in some of the items that will be on display. “It’s always been a sense of hopeful optimism, to look to the stars.” “In these times, when there’s so much anxiety and postmodernist malaise, we are excited about the prospects of continuing space exploration,” McGee says. It’s intended as a teaser for a comprehensive museum exhibition that would ride today’s resurgence of interest in space, from Elon Musk’s plans to colonize Mars to the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon.
They represent the peak period in Space Age design, 1957 to 1972, coinciding with the launch of Sputnik, the USSR’s first satellite, and ending with the final U.S.-manned lunar landing. With their support, and a donation of floor space from Rosemary Krieger of the Palm Springs Modernism Show & Sale, McGee is staging an exhibition in the lobby of the Palm Springs Convention Center featuring rare objects, many from his personal collection. Working from his home base in Buffalo, New York, McGee (who prefers the title “cultural archaeologist” to curator) connected with local preservationists Joy and Courtney Newman, who run the vintage furniture store ModernWay in Palm Springs. “In Palm Springs you had an opportunity for a lot of people to experiment and create, especially architecture that was so far ahead of its time.” “It’s a Space Age city, not just a midcentury city,” says organizer Martin McGee.
#SPACE AGE ART PLUS#
The exhibition is free to the public and part of a four-day celebration, “The Orbit of Ultramodern,” which includes book signings, plus a free film screening and lecture. The wings of the Bob Hope Estate hover over the south end of the Coachella Valley like an alien Airbnb, and a Buckminster Fuller–inspired geodesic dome punctuates the north side, with William Krisel’s House of Tomorrow in between.Īll of which makes Artifacts of the Future: Design in the Space Age, 1957–1972 a perfect fit for Palm Springs and Modernism Week. And while it’s been 65 years since extraterrestrials handed the blueprints for eternal youth to desert dweller George Van Tassel - telepathically, of course, because that’s how Venusians work - leading to construction of the magically resonant Integratron, the desert abides, waiting for the next contact. The desert has more than its fair share of sky.
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