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THE "GOOGIE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE"

Euphoria Personified

The optimism and euphoria that swept the country after World War II infused the outlook of 1950s architects. These men and women, already influenced by the brilliant Frank Lloyd Wright, had access to amazing new construction materials and building techniques generated by war technologies. Now it was time to design the postwar nation: the future was theirs.

Cars

Simultaneously, the car culture exploded. Huge, flashy American cars laden with shiny chrome and fitted with futuristic tail fins traveled the roads between the cities and the burgeoning suburbs in ever-increasing numbers.

Question:

How is it possible to lure the people in those cars off the highways and into the coffee shops and drive-in restaurants that sprang up across America? Answer: Use outrageous buildings as advertisements. There would be wild shapes, brilliant colors, and bright, spotless interiors combined with controversial metal-framed, angular designs, lavish use of glass and stone, stylized lettering, and integrated landscaping. Detractors titled these structures "Coffee Shop Modern" and the "Googie School of Architecture" after a particularly fanciful coffee shop in Los Angeles. "It starts off on the level like any other building," wrote an architectural critic about the original Googie's coffee shop in 1952. "But suddenly it breaks for the sky. The bright red roof of cellular steel decking suddenly tilts upward as if swung on a hinge, and the whole building goes up with it like a rocket ramp. But there is another building next door. So the flight stops as suddenly as it began." At night the interiors of these places were visible through clear plate-glass windows. It was modern, flamboyant architecture at its most outlandish.

Gone Googie

Today much of the Googie architecture of the 1950s is gone, razed and replaced with more staid designs. But a few Googie designs remain as nostalgic symbols of the era. Ironically, many of the more controversial design elements in the Googie buildings have now become commonplace in both commercial and residential architecture.

California Crazy

The Googie style of architecture was born in California, particularly in 1950s Los Angeles, in part because the city's mild weather was perfect for drive-in coffee shops and restaurants. Bright flashy colors, exposed neon tubing, glistening metallic reflections, and lustrous interior lighting personified Coffee Shop Modern. These artistic elements also spread to the design of supermarkets, car washes, bowling alleys, motels, highrises, homes, and even a few churches. By the mid to late 1950s Googie architecture had moved east and permeated the entire country.

Favorite Symbols and Shapes

The boomerang was a favorite symbol that showed up in much Googie architecture. It was so ubiquitous, in fact, that writer Tom Wolfe suggested that the entire style be called "Boomerang Modern." The dingbat, the starburst, the sputnik, the spiky ball (a variation on the atomic symbol), and the frozen sparkler were also widely used in signs and ornaments. Americans in the 1950s were obviously fascinated by space imagery. Other favorite shapes used in Googie architecture included parabolas, pylons, trapezoids, arrows of all kinds, slanting darts, and soaring prows.

Rules of Googie

Be abstract.

Ignore gravity; whenever possible, the building must seem to hang from the sky.

Mix together two or three structural systems.

McDonald's

The 3-D, twenty-five-foot, gleaming metal parabola reaching into the sky was the original symbol of McDonald's in the 1950s. The golden arches exemplify Googie architecture. In the late 1960s public taste changed, and the McDonald's Corporation introduced a new prototype: a low-profile mansard roof and staid brick-and-shingle textures. But the golden arches were retained as the corporation's logo.