Art: Googie

Southern California, with its pagoda cinemas and eateries shaped like bulldogs, has long been noted for the world’s largest crop of chicken-wire-and-stucco monstrosities. This month HOUSE & HOME notes a new regional aberration and gives it a name: Googie. Its archetypical example, says HOUSE & HOME, is a Los Angeles restaurant named Googie’s, where a large part of the modernistic steel and stucco building takes off into the blue at a leaning angle even more startling than the Tower of Pisa.

Googie architecture, says HOUSE & HOME, is “Modern Architecture Uninhibited … an art in which anything and everything goes—so long as it’s modern … To the inventions of the modern engineer Googie adds all of Popular Mechanics, [including] walls that are hinged and roll out on casters, doors that disappear into the ground, overhead lights that cook the hamburger.”

There are certain rules, however, that a Googie architect should follow:

¶ “Although it must look organic, it must be abstract. If a house looks like mushrooms, they must be abstract mushrooms.”

¶ “Just as three architectural themes mixed together are better than one, so two or three structural systems mixed together add to the interest.”