Googie: Architecture of the Space Age

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The Theme Building at the Los Angeles International Airport, built in 1961<br>Photo by Todd Lapin, 2010

Before I moved to Los Angeles (almost 2 years ago now) I had never heard the word Googie. In fact, when a friend — a native Californian — used the term I initially thought it must have something to do with Google. I didn’t know the word, but I definitely knew the style. And I suspect you might too.

Googie is a modern (ultramodern, even) architectural style that helps us understand post-WWII American futurism — an era thought of as a “golden age” of futurist design for many here in the year 2012. It’s a style built on exaggeration; on dramatic angles; on plastic and steel and neon and wide-eyed technological optimism. It draws inspiration from Space Age ideals and rocketship dreams. We find Googie at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the Space Needle in Seattle, the mid-century design of Disneyland’s Tomorrowland, in Arthur Radebaugh‘s postwar illustrations, and in countless coffee shops and motels across the U.S.

Googie is an odd word; a funny word; a word that feels like it’s doing a few vowel-drenched laps around your tongue before finally flopping out of your mouth. Oddly enough, Googie was used as a deragatory term almost from the start — born in Southern California and named for a West Hollywood coffee shop designed in 1949 by John Lautner, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright. Architecture critic Douglas Haskell was the first to use “Googie” to describe the architectural movement, after driving by the West Hollywood coffee shop and finally feeling like he had found a name for this style that was flourishing in the postwar era.

But Haskell was no fan of Googie and wrote a scathing (by architecture critic standards) satire of the style in the February 1952 issue of House and Home magazine. The New York-based Haskell wrote part of his article, “Googie Architecture,” in the voice of a fictional Professor Thrugg, whose over-the-top praise was an indictment of Googie’s popular appeal. Haskell was an advocate of modernism, but a modernism constrained by his ideas of taste and refinement. Haskell, writing sarcastically as Professor Thrugg:

“You underestimate the seriousness of Googie. Think of it! — Googie is produced by architects, not by ambitious mechanics, and some of these architects starve for it. After all, they are working in Hollywood, and Hollywood has let them know what it expects of them.”

Haskell’s disdain for Googie was clearly rooted in his hatred for the flourishes and perceived tackiness of Hollywood.

Googies coffee shop menu (circa 1958)

Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture by Alan Hess

Perhaps no one has studied Googie and its relationship to mid-20th century futurism more closely than Alan Hess: an architect, historian and the author of Googie Redux: Ultramodern Roadside Architecture (2004) and Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture (1985). I spoke with Mr. Hess by phone at his home in Irvine, California.

“Googie started after WWII as a definable style and it caught on fire in the culture and lasted for a good 25 years or so,” Hess says.

Googie is undeniably the super-aesthetic of 1950s and ’60s American retro-futurism — a time when America was flush with cash and ready to deliver the technological possibilities that had been promised during WWII. “I really feel that Googie made the future accessible to everyone,” Hess says. As he explains it, Googie was an unpretentious aesthetic meant to appeal to the average, middle-class American: ”One of the key things about Googie architecture was that it wasn’t custom houses for wealthy people — it was for coffee shops, gas stations, car washes, banks… the average buildings of everyday life that people of that period used and lived in. And it brought that spirit of the modern age to their daily lives.”

Ship’s on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles (1958)

Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture by Alan Hess

Hess insists that Googie was a realization of the future rather than simply a promise of things to come. “Since the 19th century and Jules Verne — coming up into the 1920s and 1930s — there had been these future-oriented movies and novels and so forth which looked to the future with great promise,” Hess says. “But after WWII, a lot of that promise was actually fulfilled not only in the buildings but also the automobiles that the average American used during that time. I really feel it did not only capture the future, but it brought it in a meaningful way to people. And you see this interest in these futuristic ideas not only in architecture or car design but in cartoons like The Jetsons and places like amusements parks like Disneyland’s Tomorrowland — in advertisements, in magazines, and so forth, certainly in the movies as well. So this interest, this intrigue, this appeal of living in the future just went all across...