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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