To people of 100 or even 50 years ago, the metropolises of today would look utterly foreign. Our elevated highways, massive airports, high population density and huge skyscrapers would be breathtaking to someone from a far earlier era. But futurists of the past did their best to imagine the world of tomorrow – otherwise known as our today – and came up with some wild imagery.

San Francisco

Above (and at top) is ship engineer and inventor Alexander Weygers‘ vision of San Francisco  as he saw it from 1950. The disc-shaped objects near the water are Weygers’ patented flying machine which he dubbed the Discopter. In his visions of future American cities, Weygers imagined large Discopter ports in every city, allowing for safe and convenient travel for the city’s residents.

Los Angeles

Architect Harlan Georgescu envisioned these sky-high mixed-use buildings becoming an integral part of future downtown Los Angeles. The buildings were meant to be 500 feet tall; Georgescu’s design put living, working, dining, shopping and recreational spaces in each building. Every structure would provide homes for 200 families in the space that would normally only support 12 conventional, ground-level homes. His Sky Lots plan included a suspended freeway running between the buildings – then out to the suburbs – to alleviate some of the city’s terrible traffic problems.

Houston

In the 1920s, Houston Post writers took a stab at predicting the city’s skyline in 1980. Note the same type of elevated freeways envisioned for LA, these also leading straight into and through tall buildings. Elevated walkways were also featured in the design, essentially doubling the pedestrian space for Houston residents. Houston did eventually develop a skyline containing plenty of tall, distinctive buildings and elevated roads – it looks like the Houston Post had (mostly) realistic expectations for the future of their city.

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Retrofuturistic Urbanism 6 Cities As They Could Have Become

Massive concrete blocks float in the sky, high above the Empire State building, each inhabited by a single seemingly bewildered person. Gravity no longer applies, and residents walk around in a daze. Welcome to the dreamlike fictional urban landscapes of Russian artist Eugene Soloviev.

Soloviev’s digital art has an ominous tone to it, often featuring solitary figures in seeming contemplation of the chaos and strangeness of their environments. Muted tones, dark clouds and fog enhance a sense of disquiet. The images call to mind concept art for films, hinting at a meaning behind the confusion.

Within Soloviev’s images seems to be a wordless story, an explanation as to why a seemingly ordinary city is suddenly no longer subject to laws of physics, or for the alien-looking architecture that has sprouted up among skyscrapers. But that silence is entangled within the beauty of visual art – it forces our own creativity into action, coercing a fictional narrative from our minds.

Entirely self-taught, the 21-year-old artist started out with simple photo manipulation in programs like Photoshop and Corel, and says that “for a joke” he cut out objects and placed them in non-standard landscapes. Ultimately, Soloviev refined both his skills and his particular brand of surreal atmosphere to produce a cohesive, thought-provoking body of work.