Motorola "House of the Future" ads from the 1960s, painted by Charles Schridde

Vintage Ads group participant write_light has posted a fantastic gallery of Charles Schridde Motorola "House of the Future" ads, along with some interesting background on the series:

The artist who painted these gems is Charles Schridde (who just passed in May of this year). These ads and other vintage television ads can be had (at Amazon for an astonishing low price of 30¢, not a typo) in the book Window to the Future: The Golden Age of Television... by Steve Kosareff. Further ad paintings by Schridde are HERE and HERE at Paleofuture.com

CONTEST ENTRY: Motorola's House of The Future

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: ad • Copyfight • design • happy mutants • modernist • Old school • retrofuturism

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nixiebunny

They were quite futuristic at the time. We used to have a Motorola Astronaut TV, a 19″ B&W portable in a suitcase enclosure that could be run (for a few minutes, I assume) from batteries. It was released in 1961, and featured a lot of transistors inside.
http://www.videokarma.org/showthread.php?t=249498
mongo

Thanks, for the tip, Cory!

I ordered the book for 99 cents from Amazon. Don’t spend your 2 cent commission all at once.

I wish there were large format versions of the paintings to frame and display around my geek toys.
Dv Revolutionary

The steps look like the underside of Fallingwater where there is a stairway that descends from the house to a natural pool under the house. There is a lot of re-imagined Fallingwater in these ads.
Brainspore

Reminds me of Edna Mode’s place.
Michael Leddy

Looks like the NY Apple Store, sort of.
Eric Schreiber

I think the stairs are inspired by the GM Technical Research Center designed by Eero Saarinen. You can see photos here:
http://criticaldetroit.org/gm-warren-technical-center/
And here:
http://www.carofthecentury.com/works_of_art_inside_1956_gm_tech_center.htm
http://noctilucent-studios.blogspot.com/ Noctilucent Studios

The thing that always strikes me about that particular style of “here’s how we’ll live in the Future” advertising is how much empty space and green scenery surrounds the houses. Rarely do we see the neighbors.
GawainLavers

Man, gas is cheap in the paleofuture.
- Brainspore
  
  Don’t be ridiculous, global warming took care of that. That’s just holo-snow outside, rendered for purely nostalgic purposes. Or maybe ash from the nuclear holocaust.
taras

Everyone in the future always wore lycra bodysuits. I guess we’ll have to make do with jeggings.
- GregS
  
  > Everyone in the future always wore lycra bodysuits.
  
  That was before they realized that the future would be corpulent.
penguinchris

The second ad features a house that looks heavily inspired by the so-called Vandamm House from the Hitchcock film North by Northwest, which, sadly, was not a real house (which I didn’t realize until looking for a photo of it just now, because it looks real in the film) – which was meant to look like a Frank Lloyd Wright house. In the film it’s supposedly atop Mt. Rushmore, like the one in the ad is atop a hill.
merryswan

Oh my god. His daughter was one of my best friends in junior high school. I didn’t even know he painted. I used to check my dad’s car magazines to see if the cover credits had his name, and often they did!
Ryan Lenethen

Clearly in the future we will all be slaves to Giants who will buy our loyalty to crappy electronics.
http://www.facebook.com/postelwait Cameron Postelwait

ah, the good ol’ days when you could talk about electronics with serif fonts.
http://twitter.com/AlRoyle Alan Royle

Apparently the future was all about architecture because we were all satisfied with the electronics we already had.