The most Instagram-friendly architecture trend started with one flashy coffee shop in Los Angeles
Googie design was used to get the attention of a nation of new motorists
The broad window was curiously askew. As wide as a living room, it wedged between one of the restaurant’s walls and what appeared to be its roof. One couldn’t be sure, as none of it appeared to be structurally necessary anyway. In fact, most of the facade was made of glass. Inside, the sunlight flared against gleaming linoleum and chrome-lined walls.
Designed in 1949 by John Lautner, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, the shop lived on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights in West Hollywood. Though novel at the time, its wide windows and unapologetic advertising would soon become commonplace. But the building’s whimsical quirks marked the beginning of a midcentury architectural movement named after the coffee house itself.
Googie’s “starts off on the level like any other building. But suddenly it breaks for the sky. The bright red roof of cellular steel decking suddenly tilts upward…and the whole building goes up with it like a rocket ramp,” wrote Douglas Haskell, the ruthless House and Home magazine critic who nonetheless helped launch Googie’s notoriety, in 1952.
But compared to the designs that would follow, Googie’s coffee shop looks positively traditional.
Most famously echoed in The Jetsons, the McDonald’s arches, and Disney’s Tomorrowland, Googie design—sometimes known as “coffee-shop modern”—boasted cantilevered roofs, neon fixtures, and gleaming steel overhangs. Starbursts erupted overhead; pointy fins thrusted into the sky. Some structures even looked like giant hovercrafts floating above the hot pavement.
Postwar America finally had time (and money) for the future. The automobile became a household staple at the same time the middle class sprawled into freshly built suburban homes. Travel was not only possible; it was a benchmark of financial success. As families cruised and plumed in their new cars, a new kind of eatery popped up. Around the country, drive-ins and roadside stands catered to a newly mobile public with money to spend.
In Los Angeles, the city of freeways, it was even harder to grab the attention of speeding cars. So, restaurants like Googie’s improvised. They ordered colorful, upswept roofs, angular lines, and aeronautic canopies. Surfaces were smooth and polished — everywhere glass, steel, and plastic. Finishes included giant clocks, zigzags, triangles, spotlights, and suspended globes that looked like atoms. Each building was an operational billboard.
“California was the land of the freeway, with the choice to eat at competing restaurants at one interchange after another, so the restaurants’ need for a conspicuous profile was especially intense,” wrote Philip Langdon in his 1986 book, Orange Roofs, Golden Arches: The Architecture of American Chain Restaurants. “The question confronting restaurant operators by the late fifties was: What would catch the eye of the fast-moving motorists?”
The answer was more. “The more startling, the better,” echoed Googie architect Pat DeRosa in the Los Angeles Times. “The more forms you used the better, especially if [the building] looked like it was just floating there, if you couldn’t see how it could stand up. That was the trick of it.”
Indeed, Googie wasn’t just a virtuous tribute to the future, it embodied consumerism — and never, ever took itself too seriously. The Southern California aesthetic so wholeheartedly embraced novelty that it quickly drew criticism. In fact, architecture critic Douglas Haskell had coined the term “Googie” as a pejorative in 1952. “It’s atrocious design — phony, dated, child-oriented trash,” wrote author William Bronson in 1968. Design sophisticates called it gauche and tacky, nothing more than a piece of costume jewelry to attract unpolished Hollywood glitterati.
But the critics couldn’t see the reality from their high horses. Googie was and will forever represent the desires and habits of the middle class. What started as coffee-shop kitsch became the characteristic look of bowling alleys, movie theaters, and even churches from Los Angeles to Las Vegas—and eventually commercial architecture throughout the country. According to Alan Hess, leading Googie historian and author of Googie Redux: Ultramodern Roadside Architecture, “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.” Googie was the “language of the public streets” — for a time.
By the 1970s, Googie had boomed and gone bust, spectacularly. Bright, futuristic, auspicious architecture did an about-face. Consumer taste in the following decade called for a return to nature, with earth tones, textures, low lighting, and shapes that blended architecture into its surrounding environment. Disney overhauled Tomorrowland in 1966, as, ironically, its space-age touches and plastic finishes had become outdated. McDonald’s abandoned its 25-foot neon arches for brick buildings with low, mansard roofs. Googie’s coffee shop itself was demolished in the 1990s to make room for a mini-mall.
One can still find Googie relics, though. The Space Needle has managed to transcend the style’s gaudy reputation, as did the offbeat, skeletal Theme Building at LAX. And thanks to a Googie preservation movement in the 1990s, the pavilions and sculptures of the 1964 New York World’s Fair still stand in Flushing Meadows.
To be sure, not everyone sees it as a design sensibility worth salvaging. These weird and laughable structures started as flashy billboards, after all. “I can’t see why they’d try to preserve any of them,” visionary Googie designer Eldon David admitted to the Los Angeles Times in 1986. “We were just designing them to sell hamburgers.”
