“Wherever one expected breakthroughs, wherever the mechanisms of the past would be uncovered so that they might be used to construct the future, there, one would only find deep sleep.”
By Niklas Maak

A half a century ago in Paris, the French carmaker, Citroën, introduced its newest model, the Model D Super, eventually known by its technical abbreviation, DS. The name alone (pronounced in French, “Déesse”) combined technology and myth with a new harmony – and the car’s design looked like no other car of its time. The DS was thoroughly modern, a car that – thanks to its hydraulic suspension – seemed to float rather than drive; that shifted into gear as if guided by the hand of a ghost; that proclaimed the end of rattling, thundering, oil-covered automobiles by replacing them with an aesthetic of gliding beauty. The seamless sheet metal and glass surfaces, the filigree steering wheel, all contributed to the impression of riding in a flying saucer. The promise held out by the Space Age was embodied in the DS: around a decade and a half before mankind landed on the moon, this automobile was already satisfying the desire to know what it would be like to travel through space. The DS and the following generation, the CX, were, like the Concorde and the TGV, icons of the French faith in progress.

Fifty years after the unveiling of the DS, there is now a new Citroen, the C6. It looks as if someone had bathed a cross between the DS and CX in dragon’s blood. In contrast to its more ethereally dynamic predecessors, this new car appears to be fashionably militaristic – the front looks as if it could split a tank in two – but more than anything, this car exudes Retro-Futurism.

This is hardly unique; after all, almost everything in the new forms of the present are mere quotations or spin-offs from the design of the ’60s. From most of the furniture presented at this year’s Milan Furniture Fair to the Volkswagen Beetle; from the new Mini to Ford Mustang – all automobiles, look as if a ’60s-era parking lot had been force-fed steroids. In the Citroën’s case, though, this is a little odd. Ultimately, Citroëns have always been an expression of an absolute, unsentimental affinity for the times, as long as that is to be understood as the satisfaction of collective needs the latest technology has to offer and the ability to distill such possibility to previously unknown forms.

Meanwhile, the notion of modernity – and the notion of the “contemporary” – has become so thoroughly minced within the postmodern, post-structuralist discourse, that it would be regarded as naive to assume it could possibly reflect what the term once meant. If design is to be thought of as the emanation of a collective consciousness and as its recognized influences, then what has been happening in the past few years?

Anyone looking for a laugh in the ’80s merely had to pull out a couple of those old magazines from the ’50s in which draftsmen and technicians imagined what life would look like in the future: houses on the moon, their gardens under glass domes; flashing robots cleaning the coffee table and wiping dust off the leaves of the rubber tree in the corner; sleek cars, flying vehicles with motors powered by small atomic reactors. Nothing has ever been as hilarious as the past of the future: the ’50s laughed at the turn of the century; the ’80s laughed at the ’50s. Today, there isn’t really much left to laugh at. Anyone leafing through an architectural magazine or frequenting furniture or car shows will come to the conclusion that the year 2005 is more or less exactly how one would have imagined 2001 at the end of the ’60s. In 1967, Stanley Kubrick directed 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the year 2001 looked like a melted wormhole of metal and white plastic. And Kubrick is still right: even 2005 looks like 2001.

The most spectacular work of the perpetual nostalgia for the future, revived yet again about seven years ago, was the Nat West Media Centre in London, built by the British firm Future Systems. Like a ’60s-era electric razor, a bizarre blister rises above a cricket stadium. What looks like plastic is actually a millimeter-thin, aluminum shell in semi-monocoque-construction – a technology most commonly associated with airplanes. All in all, these design objects, with which Marc Newson and the Ford designer Mays flooded the world, looked as if NASA had been asked to build space capsules out of plastic bags. These things seem oddly uniform, as if they had all been poured from the same plastic mold, which, like in the legendary Louis-de-Funés film L’ Aile ou la cuisse (The Wing and the Thigh) could be melted down into a car, a house, or a chair, depending on your needs. Strangely glossy, they give off the suspicious aura of deep-frozen products – at once fresh and old, as if they had been freeze-dried in 1967.

The plastic trend was not a normal revival along the lines of the purely nostalgic Bonnie-and-Clyde fashion of the early ’70s. For the first time, the irreconcilable had been brought together: nostalgia and the future. What was being quoted here was the spitting image of what one once had imagined the future to be. The lightning speed, aerodynamic, corporeal expression of these forms had always held out a promise of unlimited growth, had always expressed a boundless desire for a new and better world, some great adventure epitomized by that great modern fetish: rockets to the moon. Plastic-pop is a space-age aesthetic – and therefore perhaps the last, pathetic image of a progressive modernity whose manifest destiny was to expand to the reaches of unknown galaxies.

Then came postmodernism, and now, after “Deconstructivism,” “Second Modernism,” “New Simplicity,” and “Neo-Neohistoricism.” Trend-setting magazines coined the “future” as a category of style: In 2000, Wallpaper called it “future style”; the future itself had become historical.

The future, downgraded to a stylistic term, is actually a reference to the plastic designs and the corresponding lifestyle of the ’60s. At that point, it was clear what the future would look like: the future was nuclear power plants and spaceships, and both had an identifiable form. In time, the images of this future began to fall apart. The current use of the term, “the future,” is a mere quotation of its own iconographic tradition. Retro-Futurism is nothing more than an aesthetic feedback loop recalling a lost belief in progress, the old images of the once radically new.

In contemporary architecture, one recognizes two basic tendencies. There is a very strong sense of historicism at play; everything should be close and cosy like it was in the 19^th century – like it was before the “ravages of modernism.” On the other hand, there is a “Second Modernism,” reducing the forms of a Mies van der Rohe to a comatose state of sensual withdrawal. The shrill design objects and buildings of Retro-Futurism, appearing as a counter-thesis, repeat a fundamental conflict of modernism that had already run its course in the ’60s. At that point, the bulbous, lolli-coloured plastic-pop had begun to counter the functional tristesse erected in cities by the untalented disciples of Le Corbusier and the other high priests of rationalism. The beanbags and plastic chairs by Eero Aarnio and Verner Panton were a palace revolt in the monastic walls of modernism – an attempt to break out of those uncomfortable steel chairs into which Mies had banned them. Founded in the ’60s, the architectural firm, Future Systems, designed buildings in the shape of sexual organs. Body cult and space-age aesthetics were melded by the great heroes of plastic-pop. The Pantone Chair and the Citroën DS were visions of design that promised a sensual and exciting future in which artificial, plastic creatures conjure unexpected pleasures.

This heroic dream of an artificial plastic paradise whipped up by believers in progress was brought to an end by the Club of Rome, ecological movements and critical theorists. In the late ’70s, the plastic orgies of the ’60s did not represent the same anticipation for the future, but instead, symbolized an environmentally terrorizing consumption. Pinewood was the new material of an ecological, anti-capitalist correctness, and even the yuppie flats of the ’80s were furnished with black lacquered wood rather than plastic. Trends in the design of automobiles similarly acted as a seismograph of societal fear and neurosis. Cruising goddesses were replaced by Oil Crisis design – cars started looking unpleasantly square, and then, affirmatively harmless. A silly, zoomorphic, ballish design entered into the styling of small cars. Renault’s Twingo and Nissan’s Micra appeared like dachshund puppies, one of them looking at you from its round headlights so innocently you’d think its little motor couldn’t hurt a thing. With a conscious move toward infantile product design, these automobiles were exempted from any sort of ecological responsibility in a depressing show of sensitivity and political resignation: drive the retro-mini to the retro-party, drink retro-cola in retro-chairs and hope that everything will turn out for the best.

Retro-Futurism protested against the power of the cowardly, who cultivated deconstruction, reduction, and contrition as their only vision of the future. It was a product of its time, in which a society could still believe in the progress contained in a shiny, rounded, and pantone-colored world. But in the end, it wasn’t much more than colorful melancholy.

Even the Citroën is melancholia on wheels. It adheres to two homemade design iconographies of the ’50s and ’70s – but it adheres to the aesthetics, not the technology. Emulating merely the forms rather than the spirit of the DS or CX, the new Citroën fails to create a new form that would be as meaningful to our time as the DS or CX were in their respective epochs. Anyone who could then afford a DS at the age of 40, or a CX at the age of 50, is nearly 80 today – clearly, the only technical revolution that the new Citroën can offer is the AFIL-system, a rattling mechanism in the front seat designed to spring into action if the system’s sensors indicate that the car has veered over white lines on the edge of the road and wake the driver. The promise for a future by technological means emerges with the new Citroën C6 as an attempt to evade the dangers of aging – rather than promising the future as it has never been experienced before, this successor offers just another system for warding off death.

What’s more, Retro-Futurism has sunk to sleep-inducing aesthetics. Designers recently presented a 20,000 euro, womb-like cocoon for an office called “Nap Yourself,” where one can do just that. Wherever one expected breakthroughs, wherever the mechanisms of the past would be uncovered so that they might be used to construct the future, there, one would only find deep sleep.

Retro-Futurism is the aesthetics of the fin de siècle. If you went into a bar in Berlin in the late ’90s, you would encounter the affluent downtrodden I-don’t-know-whatters of this fin de siècle amidst the deepest of orange upholstered sofa landscapes as they sprinkled themselves with French electro-pop like heads of lettuce in a Dutch greenhouse – all the while asking themselves if there might be something with which to whet their identity. Instead of windows, there were aquariums in the walls. Immersion prevailed. One was – and this, too, was an attitude reinforced by the bad interior design – whiny, apolitical, and perpetually tired. One went underwater until it was the year 2000, and then, suddenly 2005, and we are still stuck in those lounge sofas of the fin de siècle. Retro-Futurism became what its counterpart has always been: a variation of historicism that shelters itself from the demands of the present amid the securities of décor from the past. Design and architecture, the forms of the world around us, achieve an atmosphere that can either put you to sleep or invigorate. For this reason we urgently need new forms and new ways to think contemporarily. Until these new forms establish themselves as the future of the 21^st Century, the cars, houses, and furniture of Retro-Futurism will persist – as melancholic stills depicting our desire for our own present.

Niklas Maak is editor at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.