BRmovie.com: Blade Runner Souvenir Magazine - Official Collector's Edition

Left: Syd Mead's vehicles of the future are parked on the rainy downtown streets. His design for the parking meter is based on present-day meters and "retrofitted" with a more accurate and secure system.

Far Left: Mead's production drawing of a parking meter not to be tampered with.

Left: This sketch of a "prime mover" vehicle is Syd Mead's concept for futuristic sanitation.

Things are "retrofitted" after the fact of the original manufacture because the old, consumer-based technology wasn't keeping up the demand. Things have to work on a day-to-day basis and you do whatever necessary to make it work. So you let go of the style and it becomes pure function. The whole visual philosophy of the film is based on this social idea.

The city was getting very dense. Buildings 3,000-3,500 feet high would have old, ten and twenty story buildings underneath, functioning as service accesses to the huge megastructures. Cables and generator tubes, delivering air and waste, would go up outside of the old buildings because they were still there. The street level becomes a service alley to the megastructures towering above.
- SYD MEAD

Almost as production began, we started building additional miniatures and more buildings, working on a smaller scale so Ridley could have more scope. He'd have the cityscapes in the background that actually aren't buildings at all - but we dressed them up with lights so they looked like they were.
- DAVID DRYER