page_title: Googie architecture
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: Googie architecture / Origins
caption_attribution_description: English: Sparkle Car Wash, in San Bernardino, California, United States, is an example of Googie architecture.
context_page_description: Googie architecture is a type of futurist architecture influenced by car culture, jets, the Space Age, and the Atomic Age. It originated in Southern California with the Streamline Moderne architecture of the 1930s, and was popular nationwide from roughly 1945 to the early 1970s.
  Googie-themed architecture was popular among motels, coffee houses and gas stations. The style later became widely known as part of the mid-century modern style, elements of which represent the populuxe aesthetic, as in Eero Saarinen's TWA Flight Center. The term Googie comes from a now-defunct coffeehouse in Hollywood designed by John Lautner. Similar architectural styles are also referred to as Populuxe or Doo Wop.
  Features of Googie include upswept roofs, curvaceous, geometric shapes, and bold use of glass, steel and neon. Googie was also characterized by Space Age designs symbolic of motion, such as boomerangs, flying saucers, diagrammatic atoms and parabolas, and free-form designs such as "soft" parallelograms and an artist's palette motif. These stylistic conventions represented American society's fascination with Space Age themes and marketing emphasis on futuristic designs.
context_section_description: The origin of the name Googie dates to 1949, when architect John Lautner designed the Hollywood coffee shop Googies, which had distinct architectural characteristics. The name "Googie" had been a family nickname of Lillian K. Burton, the wife of the original owner, Mortimer C. Burton.
  Googies was located at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights in Los Angeles but was demolished in 1989. The name Googie became a rubric for the architectural style when editor Douglas Haskell of House and Home magazine and architectural photographer Julius Shulman were driving through Los Angeles one day. Haskell insisted on stopping the car upon seeing Googies and proclaimed "This is Googie architecture." He popularized the name after an article he wrote appeared in a 1952 edition of House and Home magazine.
  Though Haskell coined the term Googie and was an advocate of modernism, he did not appreciate the Googie aesthetic. In his article he used the fictional Professor Thrugg's overly effusive praise to mock Googie, at the same time lampooning Hollywood, which he felt informed the aesthetic.
caption: Googie-style car wash
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