Last winter I spent three weeks driving the length of Route 66, and somewhere between Tucumcari and Amarillo I pulled into a diner with a roofline that swooped upward like a bird mid-takeoff. The sign out front was a chrome starburst, and the booths inside were upholstered in tangerine vinyl. I ordered a milkshake and sat beneath a ceiling that arched like the inside of a spacecraft. This, I thought, is what architecture looks like when it genuinely believes in tomorrow.
The Geometry of Optimism
Googie architecture emerged in the late 1940s from the collision of car culture, space-age restlessness, and the particular brand of optimism that flourished along the Southern California coast. Architects working the Sunset Strip were not trying to make grand theoretical statements. They were trying to get a family in a station wagon to pull into the parking lot. Every boomerang roofline and flying-saucer canopy was a semaphore flag waving at forty-five miles per hour: the future is here, and it has a counter service. The forms were exuberant, almost reckless in their certainty that tomorrow would be bigger, faster, and chrome-plated.
What strikes me most now, driving past the handful that survive, is how seriously they took delight. The starburst motifs were not ironic. The kidney-shaped planter beds were not camp. These were licensed architects with structural engineering credentials who decided that a coffee shop deserved a roofline that defied gravity. The cantilevered overhangs at Orbit Grill still jut out over the sidewalk like a dare, seventy years after they were poured in concrete. Try finding that kind of conviction in a contemporary drive-through.