Alan Hess Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture, Chronicle Books: San Francisco, CA, 1985, 1950s
The '50s:
"Does Atomic Radiation Promise a Building Revolution?" -Architectural Forum, 1954
" . . . the Wichstand coffee shop stands . . . since 1957 . . . Through its tilting roof plunges a large slanting dart. It seems frozen in an instant of centrifuge, whirling out of control, forever about to topple. Only the palpable momentum of the space age seems to hold it in place . . . the antigravity architecture of the atomic age. (The Wichstand's pylon was a separate structure, supported by guy wires dropped through a hole in the jutting roof.) p. 31
" . . .
"The Streamline style had served well as the style of technology before the war, but a new architecture of wonder would now have to be invented. The Arroyo Seco freeway, begun in 1936 and one of the first in the world, was two lanes in each direction from Pasadena to downtown Los Angeles; in the fifties work began on the Los Angeles freeway system with six lanes each way, climbing to multiple-storied cloverleaf interchanges. Bulbous zeppelins promised to rule future transcontinental travel . . . but the war had produced the jet plane and the sound barrier was broken in 1947 . . . " p. 33
" . . .
"During the twenties and thirties, Giant Object architecture had reflected the public's sense of wonder and delight about Southern California as a classic Eden, the land of sunshine. . . . The public's interest in fantasy switched gears from oversized fruits, doughnuts, hats, and pets to the power and wonder of atomic energy, television, and space travel. . . . The future was a natural theme that the public was ripe to experience . . . with the climate of technological optimism." p. 34
"Plastics were one such product: their moldability and physical properties had made them perfect for the special requirements of electronic gear and plane windshields during the war. In 1945, plastics factories with no war to supply looked to the consumer market. By the mid-fifites, the synthetic plastics industry was the fourth largest basic industry in the country, after steel, lumber, and glass.
" . . . the fifties [produced] freeways, transisters, computers, station wagons. . . . Joseph McCarthy, but also Martin Luther King.
"New recording techniques, transister radios, electric guitars, the long playing record, . . . youth mass market. . . The old living room cabinet radio of the thirties was now small enough to fit into a pocket.
"The money had started to roll in during the war itself, feeding the car culture on the home front, spearheaded by teenagers. Hot rodding-putting together junk cars . . .and customizing became fashions . . .
" . . .The underlying assumption of the designs is that the world could be brought to perfection and all experience controlled through modern design. . . ." p. 34
" . . . the images of rockets and jets . . . populated the visual landscape of the fifties . . .
"The machine assumed a character of benevolence, strength and progress . . . ." p. 36
LA in the '50s:
"God made Southern California-and made it on Purpose." Charles Fletcher Lummis
("Norm's . . . Reflected light off the upswept ceiling created a three-dimensional billboard of activity and color; the restaurant was its own advertisement.")
"Throughout Southern California in the postwar years, business travelers and young families . . . were lured down the strip by roofs shaped like colossal undulating clouds by day, and by incandescent oases of cleanliness, color, and cheer by night.
"The jutting silhouettes of the coffee shops dominated the strip, counterpointing the rhythmic cadence of power lines and speeding cars.At night, by careful intent, these solid volumes transmuted into the nighttime media of light, color, and shadows.
" . . . Norm's is a three-dimensional billboard behind gem-clear plate glass to attract the customer's eye. The upswept ceiling reveals a lighted interior of gleaming stainless steel, modern spun-glass light fixtures, and highly colored decorations. . . . Neon pennants overhead, waving in the electronic breeze, spell out Norm's and rhyme with the diamond-shape roof truss.
"Los Angeles in the 1950s was a modern city. The opportunities of the postwar boom in the freedom of Los Angeles allowed architects ranging from John Lautner to Richard Neutra full rein in a new phase of Modernism. The optimistic exploration of materials and structures . . . continued. But as widely publicized as were Lautner's Silvertop or the series of Case Study houses sponsored by Arts and Architecture magazine, or other high art buildings, they were only a fraction . . ." p. 39
" . . .
"Los Angeles took advantage of its prospering economy, it talent, its burgeoning population, and its laissez-faire tradition to develop an architecture appropriate to the times and the needs of the day . . .
"The modern landscape was made up of buildings used by a broad section of the public: supermarkets, motels, car dealerships, bowling alleys, car washes, gas stations, stucco box apartment houses, laundries, and coffee shops. Together they offered a panorama of the future stretching to the rims of the Los Angeles basin. Here were the Eichler Home tracts that brought modern outdoor living to all; here were the great linear shopping strips that made every commodity from doughnuts to banking available from your car. There were the great amusement palaces . . , with their vast halos of asphalt parking lots, a challenging new architectural element with which no previous generation had to cope. . . .' p. 40
" . . .
"Bowling alleys, dating from the thirties, became palaces of sport in the fifties, with entries rivaling the portals and triumphal arches of Classical and Renaissance architecture.
"Water was as important to a desert city like Los Angles as its cars, and car washes celebrated it in a way it had only rarely been honored since Bernini's fountain in Piazza Navona. Fountainlike steel pylons sprayed into the sky, melding and pulling apart as the car passed, sculpting space." p. 41
" . . .
"The strip environment was as thoroughly shaped to the requirements of car transportation as the piazzas of Italy responded to the needs of the pedestrians. . . .
"The strip was scaled to the vision of a person in a car traveling at thirty or forty miles per hour with a number of distractions. . . .
"The White Towers back East had pioneered the strategy of repetition, which influenced the look of the strip . . . . McDonald's would use the same technique, as would Holiday Inns . . . .single story and mostly sign: a six-foot-wide yellow fascia sign . . . spelled out in the familiar script was the entire architecture . . . The roadside sign . . . featured a great boomerang arrow and a radiating star . . .
"The landscape of Pop Art was developing. The bright colors, bold delineations, popular symbolism . . . were being produced by commercial and vernacular processes. This . . . style was created for recreation, entertainment, and business, but it also had the ability to impress artists with its excess, palm trees, aggressive commercialism, freedom, and crude and vital architecture. The wild forms, glinting surfaces, overscaled hot dogs, clusters of gigantic billboards, private and public fantasies, and neon districts rivaling the most garish sunsets showed a heedless disregard of good taste . . . Moreover, Los Angeles proved that a city planned on the basis of abandoning most of the rules could work in ways unimagined. The large scale helped create a visually cohesive aesthetic . . ." p. 43
"This 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 midair, combining cursive script with print, its collage design threw together bubbling circles and out-of-whack squares and unexpected angles to pile on all the spontaneity, enery, and tension possible, surrounded by an aura of dingbats (that starburst motif borrowed from printing) and sparkles. . . ." p. 44
"Even the names were kinetic: Biff's Tip's, Ship's, Chip's, Bob's, Norm's, Rae's." p. 45
" . . .
"At the Santa Monica Auditorium, the entry canopy hangs from tapering pylons that rise to extraordinary heights to create a car wash at a civic scale. . . ." p. 46
" . . .
("Jack-in-the-Box, Mark II, c. 1958. logo came from the imaginative disguise Robert Peterson . . . invented for the exhaust fan on the roof. Mark II's two story design was an imaginative circumvention of sign ordinances; by putting four billboards together in a cube, they got the same scale and graphic vitality of a sign in a building. "The towns never caught on," says Peterson. The architect was Wayne Williams and Whitney Smith who contributed to the Case Study Houses. The Mark II graphics were designed by John Whitney.) p. 47
'50s houses:
" . . .
" . . . the Eichler Homes of California brought the indoors-outdoors spaces and structural expression of modern architecture to the mass housing market.
". . .
"Inside, partition and cabinet walls rise short of the ceiling, defining living, cooking and dining areas. With natural-finish wood veneer, up-to-date appliances, and built-in counters and tables, the open kitchen is designed to be seen and to be part of the living area, carrying over the idea of exhibition cooking from the coffee shop. The broad sweep of the plank ceiling and exposed beams unifies the informal spaces. The bedroom in contrast is private.
" . . . Eichler architects (Anshen and Allen, A. Quincy Jones and Frederick Emmons and Claude Oakland) helped develop a popular modern vocabulary to communicate the idea of the modern house. In the fifties people not only dreamed of the future, they also lived in it . . ." p. 53
'50s cars:
" . . .
The Coffee Shops:
"Googie Canons: It could look organic, but it had to be abstract; it had to ignore gravity; pluralism in all aspects; any material at all would do including steel, concrete, glass, asbestos, cement, glass block, plastics, plywood; expect strangeness;
" . . .
" (Biff's, 1950, Douglas Honnold . . . Santa Monica, remodeled or demolished. With exposed neon tubing, steel channel decking, and glistening metallic reflections, the Biff's seem austerely high tech today. But the horizontal and vertical slabs, pinned together with oblique steel beams, created an elegant composition.)" p. 67
" . . . Edgardo Contini, who engineered buildings for Charles Eames and [John] Lautner as well as Honnold, engineered Biff's."
" . . . Biff's introduced this strategy known as exhibition cooking as part of the restaurant's architecture and marketing. . . . p. 68
"The cooking grill, for instance, was a raised surface surrounded by a trough for easy cleaning; . . . Drawers were sized for specific pans. Even the cooks were trained to appear and to cook presentably; they were instructed to use fresh pans with butter for each new egg order, so the customer, looking over the cook's shoulder, could see it. Plates were stacked on spring-loaded devices that kept the supply neatly stored but easily accessible.
"All fixtures were stainless steel, which, though expensive, was used for cleanliness. The shimmering image of silver surfaces was clean and modern. In later coffee shops Formica surfaces, bonded to stainless steel, allowed color and pattern . . ." p. 69
". . . Honnold's reputation [was such] in the restaurant business, that the McDonald Brothers came to him with a sketch, and he suggested that if they knew what they wanted they could design it themselves. They turned to architect Stanley Meston. p. 69
" . . .
"Louis Armét and Eldon Davis established the Coffee Shop Modern as a major popular style. . . . including Bob's Big Boy and Denny's. USC School of Architecture graduates . . ." p. 71
" . . . in association with equipment designer Stan Abrams, designed their first Norm's . . . The bold roof was an elongated diamond shape derived from a structural truss. It was seated on a rough artificial stone wall, its tapering end cantilevered out over the seating and planting. A lightened web steel I beam rose through the roof to carry the sign. A strip of seating edged in glass wrapped around a solid kitchen core at the rear. Space was divided into distinct areas, with angled booths, suggested by Stan Abrams, along an accordian glass wall stretching along the front; at the side, a separate area clustered booths. There was a rear entry from the parking lot Norm's had semiexhibition cooking: the cooks stood behind a low wall along the counter that hid the grills from view." p. 72
"Abrams favored Charles Eames wire shell chairs with fabric covers for the restaurants he designed because they combined a contemporary look with low maintenance. Their legs would not trip waitresses. In his own home he had Herman Miller and Eames furniture. These chairs became standard in coffee shops, though they were often replaced with fiber glass versions because of wire fatigue over time." p. 74
" . . .
"Coffee Shop Modern balances the dramatic imagery of both mesozoic nature and twentieth-century technology. Daring cantilever roofs poise on rough-hewn stone pylons or battered walls rising out of luxuriant vegetation. Spaceage plastic fixtures ornament natural stone walls." p. 75
" . . .
". . . early modern architects began borrowing from the industrial vernacular world as a source for their own shapes: steel trusses, gantries, water tanks, glass curtain walls, concrete silos each had a different form responding to their use. . . . The rough surface of unfinshed concrete became a new texture. Broad unbroken walls of glass united an entire facade. The rational geometries of steel skeletons created simple boxes and cylinders . . ." p. 79
" . . .
"The first roadside signs in the teens were ad hoc placards on poles outside a simple shed. Slowly the sign was integrated into the architecture. The impact of this simplification would help a motorist get the message more quickly and easily. Giant Object architiecture grabbed the eye and often told you the menu in an instant; the signs of Stream-line drive-ins were designed as a part of the architecture.
"The signs of coffee shops and car washes of the fifties also echoed the design motifs of the architecture, but went a step further to make the building's roof a sign, too. At night the interior, visible through gem-clear plate glass windows, became a living billboard itself. The angle required to make the interior visible, the scale and illumination of the roof at night, the simplicity of its shape by day were all worked out in practice . . ." p. 79
" . . .
("Penguin, 1959, Armét and Davis. Lincoln at Olympic, Santa Monica. Indoor planters, glowing orbs, and original artwork, often in plastic, were integral to many coffee shop designs. Rather than add ornament to the architectural structure, Davis believed in incorporating contemporary art work by artists and crafts people. Then the structure, left simply expressive of its structure would not date.) p. 84 and 93
" . . .
Glossary:
("Bowling Alley, Pico near Third, Santa Monica)
"The dingbat, the starburst, the sputnik, the frozen sparkler are all descriptions for a symbol widely used in signs and ornaments in the fifties. It depicted energy caught in the act of explosive release, like a corruscating diamond. The space imagery inherent in the shape reflected the optimism of an age that topped itself by going from amazing feat to unparalleled wonder." p. 130
"An earlier version of this spiky ball was seen at the 1939 New York World's Fair. It was used to depict electricity in the Star Pylon by architects Francis Keally and Leonard Dean.
"The spiky balll was a variation on the atomic symbol, four electons in a symmetric orbit around a nucleus. Spencer Weart's research has revealed that Nils Bohr first used the symbol as a diagram of the atom in 1912. It was commonly used in scientific journals, but caught on popularly after World War II when atomic energy was suddenly center stage . . . Like the sputnik shape, it contrasted a solid volume with the pure geometry of lines. The same aesthetic concept was seen in some Eames chairs, which contrasted molded plywood planes with thin metal legs. George Nelson designed wall clocks in the starburst shape in the late forties, which showed up in many homes. p. 131
Guided Tour of Googie:
- Bowl, 234 Pico at Third, Santa Monica
- Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Main at Pico, Santa Monica
- Penguin, Lincoln at Olympic, Santa Monica, 1959, Armét and Davis
- Car wash, Ocean Park at Lincoln
- [Bonus Car Wash, Lincoln at Ashland?, 2004]