Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

Far OUt: the SpaCe age IN aMerICaN CUltUre
181
googie styles, which reached their apogee in the slice of southern California
that stretched between hollywood and disneyland. In 1949, the architect
John lautner had designed a building for googie’s Cofee Shop on Sunset
Boulevard in los angeles. architecture critic douglas haskell wrote an article
in House and Home Magazine in 1952 in the form of a playful interview with a
fcticious expert on “googie” architecture. “It seems to symbolize life today,”
his imaginary expert explained, “skyward aspiration blocked by Schwab’s
pharmacy.” the article closed with the rumination that seemed to be at the
heart of Cold War googie: “It’s too bad our taste is so horrible; but it’s pretty
good to have men free.” 57
googie quickly moved beyond cofee shops. architect John lautner’s
own 1960 home, the Cemosphere (recently saved and rehabilitated by the
german book publisher Benedikt taschen) shimmered above the horizon like
some extraterrestrial hovercraft. Built in the hollywood hills of Mulholland
drive, lautner’s design responded to the challenge of building on a 45-degree
slope. erected on top of a 30-foot concrete pole, it appeared to defy not just
conventional forms but gravity itself. 58 googie, douglas haskell wrote, “was
an architecture up in the air.”
googie’s infuence fowed out into highways and towns throughout the
nation. “Serious” architects picked up the googie designation as a slur, but it
became the roadside look of a Space age nation-on-the-go. Just as the space
race defed gravitational laws, so representations of space ofered suggestive
mixtures of lines and curves that faunted the conventions of earthbound
realities. travelers in the late l960s could stay in the Space age Inn or the
Cosmic age lodge. after taking in disneyland (a googie paradise), they might
shop in Satellite Shopland and cruise by the fabulous anaheim Convention
Center. gas stations might rest in the shade of characteristically upswept roofs
and aerospace-inspired fying buttresses. In googie, domes hugged earth as
spires and starbursts (see las Vegas and holiday Inn) transcended terra frma.
the original Mcdonald’s golden arches projected a Space age ellipse. If googie
had any rules of form, they were the embrace of abstraction and surprise. 59
as in other Space age representations of the future, googie’s futuristic elements
often mixed anachronistically with primitivist motifs: tiki-hut roofs, South
sea island-style lava rock walls, frontier themes. long before the postmodern
architecture of the end of the twentieth century self-consciously (and
57. douglas haskell, House and Home Magazine, (February 1952) http://www.spaceagecity.com/googie/
index.htm (accessed September 15, 2007).
58. alan hess, The Architecture of John Lautner (New York, NY: rizzoli International publications,
1999).
59. alan hess, Googie: Fifties Cofeehouse Architecture, (San Francisco, Ca: Chronicle Books, 1985), and
philip langdon, Orange Roofs, Golden Arches:The Architecture of American Chain Restaurants (New
York, NY:alfred a. Knopf, 1986).