Home of the future by Syd Mead

This is not visual futurist Syd Mead's  most visually striking, ambitious or creative piece but for me it creates a whole retro-future world in one image. A world where you come home from work, in your sleek Sentinel car, to be greeted by a Symphony Angel lookalike dressed in a yellow, belly-baring trouser suit, matching gloves and boots and sitting on a yoga mat. It is an exercise in perspective, more than anything else, but the sleek. modular (the picture was done for a planned book for US Steel), modernistic house, built around the rocks and the trees. speak of a clean, glittering alternative future. I love this picture! Produced in 1970.

Brasenose College by Claude Buckle

This is a picture of my college at Oxford, Brasenose, by railway poster art master Claude Buckle (1905-1973). Originally trained as an architect, between 1932 and 1963 he produced dozens of posters for the railways, together with a number of those panoramic pictures that I can remember used to brighten up railway carriages when I was small.

Old Quad at Brasenose offers the finest view in Oxford, looking out over the dome of the Radcliffe Camera and St Mary's, the university church.  Dating from 1509 the third storey of the quad was added in the seventeenth century,