Blackbird

This photograph is nothing special, but it is a photograph of something very special indeed.

The SR-71 is, in my view, the single most astonishingly beautiful work of industrial design from the twentieth century. Signifier and signified—form and function—are united in this vessel in an unprecedented way. You cannot look at this object without understanding, viscerally, what it is and what it does.

It is fast. It is secret. It is unconventional. It is blazingly modern (still! despite being put into service in 1964). It is both costly and tremendously valuable. It is about acquiring information, and not at all about destruction. Its defense was simply to be better and faster than its enemies.

How I wish I had seen this plane in flight! (Although, given that it traveled from coast to coast in little more than an hour, if you blinked you probably missed it.)

This was one of the first aircraft built using CAD (computer-aided-design),* but everything about it points to a unified vision, a designer’s personal stamp. The chines and the jet-within-a-ramjet design may have been dictated by equations, but the whole is not merely a product of its parts. It fits together the way it does because somebody decided that’s the way it needed to be.

The cant of the tailfins is so visually compelling that it showed up in spacecraft—which would have, of course, no need for such aerodynamically-dictated elements—in popular science fiction movies (Star Wars, I’m looking at you).

This object is a concrete expression of excellence. Everyone involved in its design and operation knew it. And so do the rest of us who have eyes to see.

*Hmm. Different sources say different things on this point. If it was designed with slide rules and blueprints, all the more amazing.