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. “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. Hess by phone at his home in Irvine, California. 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). Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture by Alan Hess
Haskell’s disdain for Googie was clearly rooted in his hatred for the flourishes and perceived tackiness of Hollywood. After all, they are working in Hollywood, and Hollywood has let them know what it expects of them.” Think of it! - Googie is produced by architects, not by ambitious mechanics, and some of these architects starve for it. “You underestimate the seriousness of Googie. Haskell, writing sarcastically as Professor Thrugg: Haskell was an advocate of modernism, but a modernism constrained by his ideas of taste and refinement. 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.
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.īut 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.
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. 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. 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. It draws inspiration from Space Age ideals and rocketship dreams. It’s a style built on exaggeration on dramatic angles on plastic and steel and neon and wide-eyed technological optimism. 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. I didn’t know the word, but I definitely knew the style. In fact, when a friend - a native Californian - used the term I initially thought it must have something to do with Google. Before I moved to Los Angeles (almost 2 years ago now) I had never heard the word Googie.
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