In Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture, Alan Hess examines the swooping lines and gravity-defying structures that permeated 1950s architecture, reflecting the finned cars and found throughout the California highways. Hess begins with an examination of architecture in the ’30s in order to set up how the futurism on display at events such as the New York World’s Fair foreshadowed the styles of the immediate postwar years. He primarily focuses on California and the area around Los Angeles, looking at houses, cars, coffee shops, and restaurants like McDonald’s. Hess shifts to the late ’50s, the Las Vegas strip, and the push-back from established architects who did not support styles with such close ties to advertising. Hess concludes, “Until recently, the fifties have been a little too close for critics, writers, and professionals to have a good perspective on them. Most assessments of Coffee Shop Modern are the product of high art critics’ low opinion of the fifties: coffee shops are corruptions of the original, pure high art versions of the modern style. In the rush to establish a single reigning modern style, Googie became a dropped thread in the fabric of Modernism. Rediscovered it shows that Modernism has always been wider than academies acknowledged, that its roots went deeper in the culture than has been admitted since” (pg. 119).

In linking the ’30s with the styles of the ’50s, Hess writes, “Wright and Goff choreographed a flow of movement that carried you along, making you aware of each space and transition. Uninterrupted by conventional doors, walls, corners, or windows, space flows continuously around the next corner and outside. This is the final destruction of the box originally called for by Frank Lloyd Wright. It is also the three-dimensional architecture historian Sigfried Giedion identified with Modernism: buildings perceived as a totality only as one moved through and around them” (pg. 85). He features extensive photographs to demonstrate how these styles opened up and blended both the liminal space of outside/inside as well as merging Earth with sky and linking the roadway to the parking lot.

Writing in the 1980s, when fashions began changing again and moving further away from Googie, Hess described how it was subject to criticism even in its own time. He writes, “The one certain difference between high art and commercial vernacular architecture was the quality of the rhetoric surrounding it. The high art establishment used talented critics and the established journals to let people know what their buildings were about” (pg. 94). Googie, for all its visual language, served primarily commercial and advertising interests and did not appeal to critics. Redevelopment in the 1980s lead to the demolition or repurposing of much of the surviving examples.

Hess’s book will appeal to all those interested in the styles of the postwar era and how the architectural arts blended with advertising and commercialism. Hess’s book thematically follows Roland Marchand’s work, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940. Hess blends analysis with images, though several of the images that appear behind text are often too dark and make the text difficult to read. Otherwise, this is a good early study of ’50s architecture. ( )

Googie is a term that refers to the spage age or ultra modern style that prevailed, in Southern California especially, from about the 30's through the 60's. The name Googie was taken from a coffee shop on Sunset Blvd. designed by John Lautner in 1949. This book isn't just coffee shops, there are other restaurants, car dealerships, homes and cars that display the influence of Googie with restaurants looking like tail fins and cars resembling rocket ships.
Raised in Garden Grove, a lot of this was nostalgic for me. Googie was all around when I was a kid, especially as we were just minutes from Disneyland with all the surrounding cheap motels designed to look like the solar system or Aladdin's lamp. These unique structures remained until Disneyland bought all of land around 1999- 2000, and wiped them out. And there in this book was a picture of the Bob's Big Boy in Garden Grove, with it's fat boy statue and Swiss cheese signage, that Mom took my sister and me to on Fridays when Dad worked late. ( )