The Retro Blog

Have a look at this photo:

Looks like a pretty standard 50s photo, right? Something you might find in Grandma’s shoebox of photos. Now take a look at the scene from another angle:

No Photoshop involved! Artist Michael Paul Smith creates these fantastically well made and detailed scenes and photographs them in natural settings and then shares them [...]

How did the Egyptian government not approve this awesome plan for sticking a tacky carnival swing ride on top of the ancient pyramids?

[via modern mechanix]

Neighborhoods full of identical little boxes has been around for well over fifty years now, and that’s plenty of time for them to be transformed by their owners. Photographer Julia Baum has a project up on her website where she documents how homeowners have made their 50s homes unique.

Tonight the boy, a friend, and I headed to a Taiwanese restaurant to try stinky tofu. When something has the word “stinky” in its title, I advise that you take the hint and avoid it. I only made it through one and a half pieces, though the boy claimed to sort of like the smell. [...]

Here at The Retro Blog, we frequently admire the homes of celebrities with, well, interesting taste in design. I must say, though, that Gary Cooper does not fit into this category. This stylish Southern California home was built in the 1950s by architect Quincy Jones. The Eichler Network has all the details, including lots of [...]

Oobject has a new list of the best mid-century modern architecture gas stations. I especially enjoy the ones with the big sweeping overhangs like this one from Sacramento.

One of the last holdovers from the 50’s you can still easily spot today are motel signs. I’m always quite surprised by the number of fantastic light up motel signs that dot the road when I travel. I’m a sucker for anything atomic or with boomerangs and arrows, and I’m not alone in this fascination. [...]

Everything looks better in Kodachrome, including my city, San Francisco. Here’s a very extensive gallery of photos of San Francisco looking the way I wished it still did today. Men in fedoras walk down a clean(!) Market Street. Quaint little China Town is shockingly free of crowds. I think I’m going to waste a lot [...]

I live in on the far SW side of San Francisco, which is practically Daly City. Most people think Daly City is decidedly uncool, but I beg to differ. On my occasional trips to Trader Joe’s I’m always finding myself wondering what people hate so much about Daly City. It has far more awesome retro houses than [...]

Now through August 17th you can check out an exhibit called Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury at the Oakland Museum of California. It features just about everything cool about the 1950’s, from jazz to animation to architecture. The exhibit focuses on postwar southern California, and has pictures by architectural photographer [...]

At some point in your life you thought it’d be awesome to live in a spaceship. Some people are living the dream.

This is a spaceship home located in Pensacola Beach, Fl. You might be able to rent it, although the link to do so is broken.

If you’ve seen Woody Allen’s Sleeper, you’ll recognize this Denver [...]

I can think of no city symbol more awesome than the Seattle Space Needle. It’s not the tallest structure. It doesn’t even really do anything. Except be awesome. You can just picture a bunch of grown men in a meeting gleefully shouting,
“Yeah, yeah, it’s gonna look like a huge flying saucer!”
“And it’ll spin around!”
“Can we [...]