19 Facts About Googie architecture

Googie architecture is a type of futurist architecture influenced by car culture, jets, the Space Age, and the Atomic Age.

Googie-themed architecture was popular among motels, coffee houses and gas stations.

Features of Googie architecture include upswept roofs, curvilinear, geometric shapes, and bold use of glass, steel and neon.

Googie architecture was characterized by Space Age designs symbolic of motion, such as boomerangs, flying saucers, diagrammatic atoms and parabolas, and free-form designs such as "soft" parallelograms and an artist's palette motif.

The name Googie architecture became a rubric for the architectural style when editor Douglas Haskell of House and Home magazine and architectural photographer Julius Shulman were driving through Los Angeles one day.

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Streamline Moderne, much like Googie architecture, was styled to look futuristic to signal the beginning of a new era – that of the automobile and other technologies.

Googie architecture exploited this trend by incorporating energy into its design with elements such as the boomerang, diagonals, atomic bursts and bright colors.

Also, at the time, the unique Googie architecture was a form of architectural expressionism, as space rockets were technological novelties at the time.

Cantilevered structures, acute angles, illuminated plastic paneling, freeform boomerang and artist's palette shapes and cutouts, and tailfins on buildings marked Googie architecture, which was contemptible to some architects of then-current High Art Modernism, but had defenders during the post-Modern period at the end of the 20th century.

Haskell's third tenet for Googie architecture was that it have more than one theme—more than one structural system.

One of the more famous Googie architecture buildings is the Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport, designed by James Langenheim of William Pereira and Charles Luckman and built during 1961.

One of the remaining Googie architecture-styled drive-in restaurants, Harvey's Broiler, later Johnie's Broiler in Downey, California, was partially demolished in 2006.

Since Googie architecture buildings were part of the service industry, most developers did not think they were worth preserving as cultural artifacts.

One of the earliest organizations in the country that advocated for the preservation of Googie architecture was the Los Angeles Conservancy Modern Committee, which was formed in 1984 in response to the demolition of Ship's coffee shop in Westwood and Tiny Naylor's Drive-In in Hollywood.

Googie architecture developed from the futuristic architecture of Streamline Moderne, extending and reinterpreting technological themes for the new conditions of the 1950s.

Eye-catching Googie style flourished in a carnival atmosphere along multi-lane highways, in motel architecture and above all in commercial signage.

Ultimately, the style became unfashionable and, over time, numerous examples of the Googie architecture style have either fallen into disrepair or been destroyed completely.

Exaggerated, once-futuristic Googie architecture style exemplified in The Jetsons cartoons and the original Disneyland gave birth several decades later to retrofuturism.

Googie architecture was the inspiration for the background art style of animated television series and movies such as Dexter's Laboratory, Johnny Bravo, The Powerpuff Girls, Futurama, George Shrinks, The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, My Life as a Teenage Robot, and The Incredibles, as well as the cover of the faux-memoir Based on a True Story by comedian Norm Macdonald.