The future used to look like this. We kept the receipts.
Retrofuturism is the future our grandparents were promised: chrome rockets, flying sedans, glass domes over dinner parties, cities that glowed like appliances. Those tomorrows never quite arrived, but the drawings, buildings, and machines they inspired remain some of the most optimistic design work ever made. We have been collecting these visions since 2009, from an 1899 postcard series to concept cars still rolling out of studios today. This is a living guide, and it grows every time the past dreams up another tomorrow.
1899
the year our oldest tomorrow begins
66+
visions of futures that never arrived
17
years collecting the future
01 · The Year 2000, As Seen From 1899
Our oldest tomorrow comes from a set of French illustrations drawn for the 1900 World Exhibition, imagining life a century ahead. Whale-drawn buses, aerial firefighters, and underwater croquet: the year 2000 as pure Belle Epoque daydream.
02 · The Artists Who Painted Tomorrow
Every era hires dreamers to draw the next one. Charles Schridde sold glowing houses of the future for Motorola, Syd Mead sketched the gleaming cities that became Blade Runner, and Matthew Lyons keeps the flat-color futurist flame burning today.
03 · Chrome Rockets and the Cars of Tomorrow
Detroit’s designers once treated the highway like a launchpad. Bubble canopies, tail fins, gyroscopic two-wheelers: these concept cars were never really meant for production, and that was exactly the point.
04 · Japanese Retrofuturism
Japan built its own tomorrow, and it looked like nothing else on Earth. Monorails, capsule towers, and candy-colored expo pavilions gave the country’s postwar optimism a visual language that still feels ahead of us.
05 · Googie and the Atomic Age
For a few decades, the future was something you could park in front of. Boomerang roofs, starburst signs, and atom-shaped landmarks turned coffee shops and world expos into spaceports for everyday life.
06 · The Space Age
Once the moon was within reach, everything else seemed to be too. NASA commissioned paintings of orbital farmland, comic books colonized Mars weekly, and pulp covers promised the stars by the end of the decade.
07 · The New Retrofuturists
The aesthetic never died; it just found new garages and new canvases. Automakers are restomodding their own heritage into electric dream machines, and contemporary artists keep painting the daydream forward.
Keep Exploring
If bold visions of the built world are your thing, continue with The World’s Most Extraordinary Buildings, where several of these futures actually got constructed. And for a full publication devoted to the future as it was once imagined, visit our sister site Atomic Daydream.