Googie Architecture: A Lost Vision of 1950’s Mobility

September 8, 2009

Googie Style

The UC Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s exhibit “Sardi’s to Orange Julius ®” that ends on the 13th of September 2009 chronicles several early 20th century restaurant designs from concept to completion and thereby sheds light on the interweaving forces of dining culture, technology, and architecture. The exhibit, whose name refers to two L.A. restaurants, includes designs from architects J.R. Davidson, Maynard Lyndon, Kem Weber, Edward A. Killingsworth, and Rudolph M. Schindler.

Although contemporary critics regarded commercial design (i.e. designing for the masses) as less prestigious than the design of private homes, architects nevertheless considered restaurant design a means for influencing the broader architectural landscape of the city. The Googie architectural movement that thus arose popularized space-age themes and the bold use of steel, glass, and neon lights to draw the eyes of motorists to the roadside and promote a new form of eating: drive-in dining. The automobile thereby influenced L.A.’s pattern of urban sprawl (into a spread-out city of suburbs), a then-new mobile dining trend, and, in the process, an architecture that expressed a generation’s view of the numerous possibilities that mobility could bring.

Although the museum’s exhibit focuses on design, one can also appreciate the broader impact of restaurants like Ben Frank’s Coffee Shop and Norms - those few Googie era restaurants that made it past the midpoint of the century. These iconic restaurants have defined popular dining and our notion of modernity at the time–- the Googie look and feel, has, after all, become one of the trademarks of 1950’s pop culture.

However, what may be most haunting about the Googie movement is how it embodies a fascination with personal mobility that has been lost. Consumers in the first half of the 20th century found empowerment in the capabilities offered by automobiles and space travel. Speeding through physical space was a fantasy come true that reached a pinnacle with the man-on-the-moon landings, which marked the official end of an era.

Since then, there’s less of a desire for mobile individuals and more of a desire for mobile services and businesses. Good-bye, drive-in movies and diners; hello, Netflix and gourmet, Twittering food trucks. Googie style may seem quaint and kitschy now because it’s a stillborn cultural movement — a false start in American pop culture that consumers grew bored of and abandoned rather than built upon. It’s the movement’s abrupt end that makes for an intriguing retrospective of an aesthetic that tried to project the future but will, ironically, always seem bygone.