International Style, the dominant style of Western architecture during the middle decades of the 20th century. Joining the firm during 1951, she created such Googie interiors as those of the Johnie's Coffee Shop on Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, the first Norms Restaurant,[27] and the Holiday Bowl on Crenshaw Boulevard. It is seen as a departure from the more skeptical and referential style of post-modernism, and more of an idealistic approach to the future. Googie advocate and architectural historiographer, Alan Hess, is a quotation in this outstanding Smithsonian characteristic, pointing out just that reality: “One of the cardinal things about Googie architecture was that it wasn’t customized houses for affluent people — it was for coffee shops, gas stations, car washes, banks… the normal buildings of routine life that people of that period used … [44], In Wildwood, New Jersey, a "Doo Wop Preservation League" works with local business and property owners, city planning and zoning officials, and the state's historic preservation office, to help ensure that the remaining historic structures will be preserved. By then, commercial tiki architecture had taken on a variety of flashy Googie details. While it combines them, it also favors functionality over ornamentation and asymetry and regularity over symmetry. [30] Because of its need to be noticed from moving automobiles along the commercial strip, Googie was not a style noted for its subtlety. It also has abstract and different decorations which are determined by the individual architect. It is characterized by dramatic roof lines, bold geometric shapes, experiments with stylized typography and use of glass, steel and neon. Googies were often designed to be both the business, and the billboard advertising the business. Hard angles, cantilevered roofs, and starbursts are all found throughout Googie architecture. The roof’s large white triangles form an arrow pointing downward, an unconscious comment, perhaps, on the eventual decline of the Googie style. [25] McAllister developed a brand for coffee shop chains by developing a style for each client – which also allowed customers to easily recognize a store from the road.[26]. [1] The style is related to and sometimes synonymous with the Raygun Gothic style as coined by writer William Gibson.. Another remaining example of Googie architecture still in operation is the main terminal at Washington Dulles International Airport, designed by Eero Saarinen in 1958. These buildings featured rounded edges, large pylons and neon lights, all symbolizing, according to Hess, "invisible forces of speed and energy", that reflect the influx of mobility that cars, locomotives and zeppelins brought.[19]. The common elements that generally distinguish Googie from other forms of architecture are: The boomerang shape was another design element that captured movement. Is it the same as contemporary? This was achieved by using bold style choices, including large pylons with elevated signs, bold neon letters and circular pavilions. Neo-futurism - Designing Buildings Wiki - Share your construction industry knowledge. Streamline Moderne, much like Googie, was styled to look futuristic to signal the beginning of a new era – that of the automobile and other technologies. An architectural style is characterized by the features that make a building or other structure notable and historically identifiable. Skylon Tower)", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Googie_architecture&oldid=997635788, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 1 January 2021, at 14:34. With the increasing prosperity of the United States during the 1950s, however, American designers celebrated this new affluence with optimistic designs. Pinterest. Googie, also known as populuxe, is a form of architecture, originating from southern California in the late 1940s and continuing approximately into the mid-1960s.It was influenced by car culture and the Space Age.With upswept roofs and, often, curvaceous, geometric shapes, and bold use of glass, steel and neon, it decorated many a motel, coffee house and bowling alley in the 1950s and 1960s. Falling in perhaps both the genres of "futurist" and "kitsch", Googie architecture is a classification for buildings which take on certain exaggerated, stylized characteristics, such as: cantilevered structures, acute angles, illuminated plastic paneling, freeform boomerang and artist's palette shapes and cutouts, and tailfins on buildings. Both the business the 1970s, commercial architecture was a symbol characteristics of googie architecture same. Space Age were well-known practitioners called Googies were purposefully designed to be and... 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