Last weekend, NASA celebrated the 10^th anniversary and its Opportunity rover, built for a 3 month mission on Mars and still gathering landmark scientific data.

Last month, Mars One announced the short list of potential Astronauts for its mission to establish a human settlement on Mars. Crews of four will depart every two years, starting in 2024.

In 1963, the artist, designer and architect François Dallegret was also dreaming of Mars. He was invited to participate in a group exhibition in Paris with the theme the Year 2104.

At that time, Dallegret also conceived a ‘Space City’, to be shot to Mars and back.

Settlement was not the mission.

“Project for a city of 7,000, to be shot to Mars (and return) for the purpose of studying the reactions of younger generations to conditions of extreme crowding in relation to speed, to acceleration, to changes in atmospheric pressures, temperatures, etc.”

Zooming in to Dallegret’s original china ink drawing, for a sense of scale we see the figure of a man, above the letter “a”, at the base of the space city.

With these preoccupations — radical living, machines, speed — Dallegret aligned himself with the great innovators of the 20th century, among them Le Corbusier, Buckminster Fuller (who exhibited a geodesic dome at Expo 67), and Joe Colombo, whose vision for streamlined modular living corresponded with Dallegret’s own futurism.

Dallegret’s space vessels are just part of the retrospective exhibition now on view at the McMaster Museum of Art, GOD & CO: François Dallegret – Beyond the Bubble.