The Vintage Beauty of Soviet Control Rooms (2018)

I recently had the luck of spending several weeks/months on a Russian icebreaker from the soviet era. It was incredible. The engine control room was a work of art. Room after room of thoughtfully constructed controls with a huge emphasis on design. The bridge was also stunning. As someone who grew up post-cold-war in the United States, it was really something to be immersed in the aesthetic and culture of Russia in that era. I'll dig up some photos and…

That's pretty standard for the era, including the mimic board of the core.[1] If you like control board designs, probably the most elegant control boards ever built were the ones for the Panama Canal locks.[2] All that chrome and brass! Those towers are water level indicators. The long polished stone slabs represent the two lock lanes. The black diagonals across them represent the lock gates, and those follow the movements of the real gates. The "faucet handles" control the gate…

Some of those are absolutely fantastic! The 3rd to last ("spiders") and 2nd to last ("neon") could be reworked into some interesting alien ship control room designs. I used to draw control panels onto play-blocks as an adolescent and tried to give them an aesthetic tilt. Reflecting the style of the times, they looked like R2D2 mated with Max Headroom: "B-b-b-beep, Ch-ch-chirp"