Googie Architecture.

Googies on Sunset Blvd

Named after a coffee shop - Googie's - designed by John Lautner in 1949, the term was first coined by House and Home magazine's editor Douglas Haskell, while driving around Los Angeles with noted architectural photographer Julius Shulman, having spotted Lautner's design.



I call it serendipity.

In my third year in Architecture school, a senior student was wandering the halls, and we started talking over my drawings for a project that was meant to be an urban school.  Probably out of stubbornness, I navigated the design towards my desired aesthetic.

My slightly revised project, a year after I graduated.

He asked if I knew about John Lautner, to which I replied that I didn't.  He encouraged me to look into Lautner's work; when I did, I discovered that there were many common themes, even though I had never seen any of his works.

I identified with the mix of organic design and futuristic ideas -- something that Lautner no doubt gained from being an apprentice under Frank Lloyd Wright, and from experiencing the spirit of the times of the 40s and 50s in Los Angeles.

Flash forward 18 years or so, and I found Alan Hess' book on Googie architecture -- his original book, out of print since the 80s, is what restarted the interest in Googie architecture.  BTW, if you're at the downtown Powell's, you might be lucky enough to find a copy of it.  This was the first time I learned about Lautner's Googies, despite my having a couple of books on his works.

Space Needle, Seattle WA

What makes Googie architecture so attractive to me, is the organic forms used to express a modernist hope of a future where life is improved and people are happy.  It utilizes sweeping curves of a landscape, the sharp and oblique angles of rock formations, and the repetitive form that we now understand as a derivative of sorts of fractal math.  Oh, and mix in a bit of whimsy with some style fonts and decorative flair.  In some ways, the architecture of Frank Gehry and many other Southern California architects reflect these themes, if you look hard enough.

The pinnacle of Googie Architecture, literally, might be considered the Space Needle in Seattle, and the 1962 World's Fair.  Not to oversimplify the complexity of the times, especially if you consider the state of race relations and rights, but the 50s and 60s exhibited a great deal of optimism that mankind could solve any problem, if it set its mind to it.

Los Angeles Airport

Maybe the appeal (for me) is that it reminds me of growing up and watching The Jetsons and The Flintstones, with their stylized interpretations of modernism.

But alas, Googie is not respected uniformly, and is attacked derisively by developers looking to tear them down.

I sometimes do not understand preservationists who would rather save a drab building simply because it is old, rather than save iconoclastic structures that deliver a strong sense of place and time within American and local history.

Denny's in Ballard, Seattle WA