Mercedes-Benz recently unveiled its Vision Iconic concept car with the tagline "showing how the future can look," but the complete statement reveals something more telling: "how the future can look when it is shaped by tradition." This sentiment perfectly captures a broader cultural phenomenon now emerging in Berlin's bid to host Expo 2035, where the future increasingly resembles a nostalgic recreation of yesterday's tomorrow.
The Vision Iconic exemplifies this retro-futurist trend perfectly. From the front, the visionary vehicle resembles the Batmobile equipped with an Adenauer grille, while its side profile evokes the classic Mercedes 540 K "Autobahn Courier." The interior features Art Deco styling, clearly referencing the 1930s—a problematic era even for Mercedes—while the rear design recalls the Mercedes 300 SL from the 1950s and 1960s, decades when Germany was actively trying to move past the thirties. This represents a future constructed entirely from symbols of the past.
Despite its nostalgic aesthetics, the Mercedes concept is technologically cutting-edge, featuring solar paint, autonomous driving capabilities, and "neuromorphic computing." This contradiction—technically futuristic but aesthetically retrograde—makes it a perfect fit for Berlin, which has emerged as the new capital of retro-futurism. The Expo 2035 participation company has just formed, describing itself as a "milestone that radiates far beyond the capital." Sebastian Stietzel, president of the Berlin Chamber of Commerce, promotes the world exhibition as enhancing "international visibility, creating significant urban returns, and acting as an investment booster for infrastructure." Such dreams persist even as the city's bridges crumble.
Berlin plans to present itself to the world as an "innovation metropolis," promising the inevitable "forward-looking solutions to global challenges" and positioning "Expo 2035 Berlin as the starting point of a future-oriented dynamic." While this sounds ambitious, the reality remains surreal. The German government must first decide whether the country actually wants a world exhibition in Berlin, and the Bureau International des Expositions won't make its selection until 2028. The timeline represents a lot of future planning, though historically, world exhibitions once genuinely sparked curiosity about tomorrow's possibilities.
The enthusiasm for this future deserves support, especially given the current atmosphere of hesitant pessimism that feels like November drizzle. However, Berlin's Expo concept reveals telling details about how we envision tomorrow. The plan includes a central area for international pavilions and "complementary projects in all Berlin districts and neighborhoods that become visible during the Expo and reflect the participation of the entire urban society." This mix of local neighborhoods and global presence sounds appealing in theory.
When it comes to involving the entire urban society, Berlin faces significant challenges. The city's residents typically oppose major developments, from building on Tempelhof Field to renovating Jahn Stadium, from the A100 highway to high-rises at Alexanderplatz, and neighborhood densification projects everywhere. The prospects for enthusiastic participation in Expo 2035's lofty ideas seem dim given the perpetually subsidized "metropolis's" angry citizen protests against virtually every proposal.
The Expo concept becomes tangible through architectural renderings created by the Laboratory for Visionary Architecture (LAVA) and Graft Architects. These promotional images serve their purpose effectively, suggesting "look how everything could appear." While everything remains completely open, the architects' vision of this open, free future reveals fascinating insights about contemporary imagination. The designs prominently feature geodesic dome structures that Richard Buckminster Fuller once conceived as "architecture's future form."
Before Fuller, Walther Bauersfeld had explored spherical domes formed by triangular lattice shells, resulting in Jena's planetarium, which opened in 1926. Fuller developed these ideas further in the 1940s, culminating in Montreal's "Biosphere" for the 1967 Expo. Those images traveled worldwide, making the future seem tangible for the first time. The Jetsons cartoon series from 1962 could easily be imagined within the Biosphere, complete with Astro the dog.
Geodesic domes offer exceptional structural stability, material efficiency, and thermal advantages through their minimal surface area relative to volume. It's unsurprising that "Bucky's bubbles" periodically resurface, including now for Berlin's Expo. This bubble architecture might indeed represent the future, particularly in an era when construction both exemplifies the climate change problem and offers key solutions. However, the computer-generated images from the decidedly non-retrospective Graft studio inevitably evoke Peter Sellers' explosive foam party in Blake Edwards' magnificent 1968 film "The Party," released just one year after Montreal's Expo.
Other renderings of the Berlin Expo recall tent roof constructions familiar from Munich's 1972 Olympics. This raises the question: what would 2035 be without 1967, 1968, 1972, or even 1926? The vintage moment and retro-obsession extend far beyond Berlin and Mercedes. Volkswagen formally wants to return to the original Golf's golden era, Audi developed its Concept C as neoclassicism on wheels, and the BMW iX3 references kidney shapes from the 1960s. From automobiles to architectural bubbles, from wall units to headbands, current trends, fashions, and future visions all seem familiar.
This phenomenon includes IKEA's vintage furniture boom and the German Football Association's cyclical nostalgia in national team jerseys—recently resembling the 1954 Miracle of Bern, now quoting the 1990s with Rudi Völler as the style icon. Fifteen-year-old Swifties have revived analog photography, vinyl records, and cassette tapes. Pinball machines, refrigerator magnets, and shoulder pads have returned to popularity, alongside veneration for Commodore 64 computers, fax machines (which never disappeared from German offices), typewriters, and historical television shows set in 1930s Berlin's Charité hospital or "The Knick" in 1900 New York. "Dallas" reruns continue, and hairstyles alternate between mullets and Barbarella cuts.
Crises have historically produced aesthetic responses through retro aesthetics. During the Biedermeier period, people retreated into private life after the Napoleonic Wars amid political repression. Today, social media serves as a privatistic filter for pseudo-public life. In Historicism, spanning from failed revolutions to approaching world war, marked by social dynamics, technological forces, and social upheavals, salvation was sought through formal regression. Both backward-looking searches for identificatory positioning and TikTok retreats into privacy fuel retro-futurism that ostentatiously conjures the future but only in forms borrowed from the past.
Utilizing geodesic domes and tent landscapes as proven constructions for tomorrow's spatial solutions isn't inherently wrong. There's nothing forbidden about petting Tamagotchis, manipulating Rubik's cubes, or making Hawaiian toast. However, it's neither hopeful nor catalytic when even the future resembles its own shadow. What was once exciting, vitalizing futurism has become a sedative. We flee into the nostalgic comfort zone of aesthetic past because we lack the strength for genuine, contemporary utopia—for images that could become promises and social objectives, providing transformational momentum. Please, invent something truly new again.
