1984 Hess 1985

Alan Hess Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture, Chronicle Books: San Francisco, CA, 19851984

     "The future ended September 20, 1984. They closed down Ship's coffee shop at midnight, and the bulldozers came in the morning.

     ". . .

     "Ship's had been finely tuned to the car culture of Southern California . . . A pavilion in a parking lot, its bold shapes and colorful spaces beckoned to drivers far down the street by offering a protected oasis in the midst of the noise and hustle of traffic . . ." p. 15

     ". . . It completed the revolution of Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier, the Futurists and the Constructivists, the Expressionists and the Bauhaus. And its accomplishments had been dismissed as "Googie."

     "So the future finally ended that night, a long process over more than a decade. They had started to build the past again . . . the coffee shops has told us about ourselves by showing us . . . what we once thought our future would look like. By the time it was torn down, we had changed our mind about what our future would be. While it remained we could be reminded of what we had once believed, and reflect on why our future had changed so much." p. 16

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 Kelyn Roberts 2017