Harry Lange was born in Eisenach/Thurigen, Germany, on December 7, 1930, and lived in this historical town - where Martin Luther translated the Bible and J.S. Bach spent a great deal of time - for the first part of his life. He studied Latin and Greek and planned to get a degree in archeology; however, when World War II ended, Eisenach/Thuringen became part of the Russian Occupied Zone (East Germany) and because of political factors he was unable to pursue this ambition.

Mr Lange left East Germany in 1949 to study art in Hamburg and Munich. Following graduation, he came to the United States and in 1951 took a position in advertising design in New York City. During the Korean War he spent three years in Alabama (Craig Air Force Base) preparing training material graphics for nine flying schools and illustrating the first complete helicopter manual. He then worked with ABMA (Army Ballistic Missile Agency) in Huntsville, Alabama, as an illustrator of space carrier vehicles and planetary missions. Later, under NASA, he become section head of the Future Projects Staff, working with a group of selected illustrators on interplanetary, intersolar and deep space projects in close coordination with the Werner von Braun team.

Mr. Lange was commissioned to illustrate several books on space travel: “The History of Rocketry and Space Travel” with von Braun as the author; textbooks for Prentice-Hall; “The Sun's Empire” for Dutton Press; and a book on extraterrestrial intelligence. He also did illustrations for U.S. magazines and Paris Match, and even a giant puzzle on the history of rocketry and space travel for Springbok and Company in New York.

Due to cuts in the space budget during the Vietnam War, Mr. Lange decided to leave NASA and devote his time to illustrating. After a two-man show of space art in Washington, D.C. with Chesley Bonstell, he met Arthur Clark, a friend from his NASA days, in New York City. Bonstell introduced him to Stanley Kubrick. As a result of this meeting, he was asked to design the interiors and exteriors of a film called "A Journey to the Stars" and later renamed "2001." After six months of basic preparation in New York City, the project moved to the M.G.M. Studios in London, and a six-month assignment was extended into two-and-a-half-years. For his work on “2001” Mr. Lange received the British Academy Award (Stella) and was nominated for on Oscar.

Deciding to make his home in England, Mr. Lange then designed sets for "Kelly's Heroes," made in Yugoslavia, and many other films and commercials. A challenging task was designing a stage production in the Casino du Liban in Beirut, Lebanon, consisting of a full-size Apollo spacecraft landing on a moon surface, moon rovers going through the audience with twenty-foot space ships coming out of and disappearing into the walls, all combined with special effects.

“Population Growth Zero” with Oliver Reed and Geraldine Chaplin followed in Denmark; the first “Star Wars” in London; “The Empire Strikes Back” also an Oscar nomination; “Moonraker” the James Bond film shot in Paris and London; “The Muppet Caper” a Jim Henson production; and, also with him, “The Dark Crystal” released at the end of 1982; the third Star Wars film, “The Return of the Jedi” and “The Meaning of Life” the last Monty Python film.

Harry Lange never did achieve his original dream - to become a classical archiologist. But in the early 1980s he became (with his son John) a staff member of the University of Arizona's archaeological expedition to Mirobriga, Portugal. While his son supervised the excavation of a Celtic wall for the University of Arizona Department of Classics, he designed and supervised the construction of the Mirobriga Room in the Portuguese museum near the excavation site.

The exhibition at Oxford celebrates the versatility and vision of this designer's designer. To him, a design must look "true" and he has an uncanny faith in his ability to make audiences believe his creations look like they work. His Art Nouveau/ Celtic infernal machines for "The Dark Crystal" are different from the Mondrian?like panels of the Millennium Falcon or the anthropomorphic futurism of "2001 " but all the designs have a functional truth in form that a skilled director/ producer (Kubrick, Lucas, Terry Jones, Kurtz, Oz, Hensen) con use to full benefit.

Lange is reluctant to see themes in his work and prefers modestly to describe himself as a designer and craftsman. He rarely talks to journalists and his incredible versatility as designer, miniaturist, art director, political cartoonist, actor, and archaeologist gives critics fits in trying to classify him. The key to understanding him may lie in the fact that he is our first popular technological artist. Classically trained and nurtured in NASA, he alone con produce the kind of functional surrealism that astonishes audiences.

His futuristic visions of mankind at a loss in a brave new world are humanized and accessible, his spaceships work but con look like sinister humans or giant menacing insects; his most abstract visions may be born of the junkyard, hardware store, or plumbing supply house. (It is no accident that Ernie Fosselias' highly successful parody of Star Wars is the short film called Hardware Wars.)

To speak of conscious symbolism in Mr. Lange's work is to miss the point. His training and his full, complex life has produced the man and the man is the work; an amalgam of modular functionalism and the Bauhaus, German Expressionism, discipline, NASA, junkyard fetishism, humour, an archaeological interest in civilization, and so on. Unlike the facile futuristic designs of so much of today's science fiction, Lange's works are landscapes of his mind and illustrate the often-unsung power of the designer in contemporary blockbuster cinema.

This text was written by John and Harry Lange with David Soren, and first appeared in “The Cinematic Universe of Harry Lange” published by the University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson. It was updated by John Lange for this web site.