Googie Architecture - Mid-Century Modern Restaurant Design

Googie architecture had its roots in the Streamline Moderne style in the 1930's and Los Angeles was going to be its epicenter with its temperate weather and its sprawling population allowing buildings to be built with lighter materials than the heavy stone or brick used in other climates.

Hamburger places were "dingy types of places" recalls Bob Wian who opened his first diner on Colorado Boulevard in Glendale in 1936 to upgrade the image of the hamburger.

The Streamline Moderne has been coming into vogue in roadside buildings nationwide.  Its modern image, affinity for the speed and sleekness of the car made it an appropriate style for a totally new building type invented by the car culture.

The "Little Shop Modern" was never high art but was enjoyed by millions.

Bowling Alleys, also dating from the 1930's, became palaces of sport in the fifties, with entries rivaling the portals and triumphant arches of Classical and Renaissance architecture.

Opening night at Bowling Alleys and Supermarkets were celebrated as movie premieres.

Googie architecture in its commercial vernacular is a style of action, of movement, of direction  It is an aesthetic of articulation and contrasts, each element given its own weight its own style, its own shape.

Disjointed, hanging in mid air, combining cursive script with print, its collage design threw together bubbling circles and out-of-whack squares and unexpected angles to pike on all the spontaneity energy and tension possibilities.

And surrounded by an aura of dingbars (that starburst motif borrowed from printing) and sparkles.

Streamlining had glorified efficiency - doing more with less - an appealing idea in the difficult economic condition for the thirties, but elaboration and even excess suited the abundance of the fifties.

Even the names were kinetic:  Bigg's, Tip's, Ship's, Chip's, Bob's, Norm's, Rae's.

Googie's was a restaurant opened in 1949 by John Lantner on Sunset Boulevard at Crescent Heights in Los Angeles.  It came to symbolize the skyward aspiration of today's life.

Douglas Haskell writing in House and Home in 1952 called the Coffee Shop modern "Googie Architecture" and the term swept through architecture schools across the country.

Its local representatives in Dallas were Kip's Big Boy restaurants and a restaurant I wasn't familiar with.

Sources:

Googie - Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture

Alan Hess, Chronicle Books, San Francisco 1985 725.1 H586G

Orange Roots, Golden Arches - The Architecture of American Chain Restaurants

Phillip Langdon Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1986 725.` L2740