Googie Architecture: The Wildly Optimistic Style That Defined Postwar America

Googie architecture is the style that put the space age on a coffee shop.

Between about 1945 and 1970, mostly in Southern California and Las Vegas, architects designed diners, car washes, bowling alleys, gas stations and motels with roofs that tilted toward the sky, canopies that cantilevered over the parking lot, and neon signs shaped like starbursts and boomerangs.

It was built to be seen from a moving car at forty miles an hour, and it was built to say that the future had arrived and you should pull over for a burger.

This is our complete guide: where the name came from, who designed it, the buildings you can still visit, the ones we lost, and why a style once dismissed as roadside kitsch is now protected by law.

What Googie actually is

Googie is commercial modernism turned up loud. It shares a family tree with the International Style and with mid-century modern houses, and it uses the same materials: steel, glass, concrete, plastic, terrazzo. What separates it is intent. A Case Study house was designed to be lived in. A Googie coffee shop was designed to be noticed from the road, to make the building itself the advertisement, and to promise that whatever was happening inside was modern, clean, fast and a little bit thrilling.

Once you know the vocabulary you will see it everywhere. Roofs that swoop upward or fold like paper. Canopies that seem to hover with no visible support. Walls of floor-to-ceiling glass so the whole lit interior reads as a sign at night. Structural elements pulled outside the building and painted, so the steel becomes decoration. Boomerang and amoeba shapes, atomic starbursts, satellites on poles. Materials that would never have met in a serious building, like flagstone next to plastic next to gold anodized aluminum. And a sign, always a sign, usually taller than the building, with letterforms that lean forward as if they are in a hurry.

Where the name comes from (it was meant as an insult)

In 1949 John Lautner, a former apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright, designed a small coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard at Crescent Heights called Googies, next door to the famous Schwab’s drugstore. Its roof kicked up at a steep angle, its glass walls were braced by red steel, and its name was spelled out in letters that climbed the facade. It was a hangout for actors, musicians and writers, and it looked like nothing else on the strip.

Douglas Haskell, an East Coast critic and editor at House and Home magazine, drove past it with the photographer Julius Shulman and was not impressed. In the February 1952 issue he published a piece titled “Googie Architecture,” written partly in the voice of an invented academic, Professor Thrugg, who praises the style so effusively that the praise becomes the joke. Haskell’s target was everything he thought was wrong with Los Angeles: showmanship, populism, buildings that behaved like billboards. He meant the word to sting. Instead he handed the style a name, and the name has outlived every building he preferred.

Haskell’s satire made one observation that turned out to be exactly right: Googie was produced by trained architects, not by sign painters, and some of them were doing their most inventive work on buildings the profession refused to take seriously.

The original Googies was demolished in the late 1980s. Nothing marks the site.

Why it happened where it happened

Googie is what you get when three things collide: cars, optimism and cheap land. California’s Collier-Burns Highway Act of 1947 funded the freeway system, and Los Angeles grew outward along boulevards where every business competed for the attention of a driver. The 1930s had already produced Streamline Moderne, with its rounded corners and speed lines borrowed from trains and airplanes. After the war the reference points changed. Jet engines, radar dishes, atomic diagrams and, after October 1957, Sputnik gave designers a new set of shapes, and a public that believed the future was going to be good.

The coffee shop was the perfect vehicle. It was open 24 hours, it was cheap to build, it needed to be visible at night, and it was owned by operators who wanted to stand out from the chain down the street. A dramatic roof cost little more than a boring one, and it paid for itself in customers. The same logic applied to car washes, bowling alleys, drive-in theaters, motels and, in Las Vegas, to entire casinos.

The architects who built it

John Lautner gave the style its name and then mostly left it behind for the extraordinary houses he is known for, including the Chemosphere (1960), the octagonal house on a single concrete column above the Hollywood Hills. But Googies and his other early commercial work established the idea that a small roadside building could be a piece of structural theater.

Wayne McAllister had been designing drive-ins since the 1930s and understood the car better than anyone. His Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank (1949) is the oldest surviving Big Boy in America and still serves dinner under its original tower sign.

Louis Armet and Eldon Davis founded Armet & Davis in 1947 and became the definitive Googie firm, designing Norms, Pann’s, Johnie’s, Ship’s, Huddle, Denny’s prototypes and dozens of others. Their coffee shops share a formula: a folded or upswept roof, a wall of glass toward the street, a counter visible from outside, and stone or brick planters that tie the building to the ground.

Helen Liu Fong joined Armet & Davis in 1951 and is one of the most under-credited designers of the century. She shaped the interiors of Johnie’s, the first Norms and the Holiday Bowl, and had a hand in Pann’s. A Chinese American woman running interior design at a major firm in the 1950s was rare enough; that her interiors defined what “a diner” looks like in the American imagination is remarkable.

Douglas Honnold, Powers, Daly and DeRosa (the great bowling alley firm, responsible for the Covina Bowl) and Stanley Meston, who designed the 1953 McDonald’s prototype with its two golden arches, filled in the rest of the roadside. Paul R. Williams, Los Angeles’s most celebrated Black architect, contributed the shell-shaped lobby of the La Concha Motel in Las Vegas (1961) and worked on the LAX Theme Building. Gin Wong of Pereira & Luckman drew the Union 76 canopy. Welton Becket gave Hollywood the Cinerama Dome (1963). And Betty Willis, a sign designer rather than an architect, produced the single most recognized piece of Googie in the world.

20 Googie buildings to know

Grouped by where they are, and whether you can still see them. Dates are the year the building opened.

Los Angeles: the survivors

1. Bob’s Big Boy, Burbank (1949, Wayne McAllister). The oldest Big Boy standing, a California Point of Historical Interest, with carhop service on weekends and a classic car meet on Friday nights.
2. McDonald’s, Downey (1953, Stanley Meston). The oldest operating McDonald’s in the world and the last with the original single-arch “Speedee” sign. Saved from demolition after the 1994 Northridge earthquake and restored by the company.
3. Johnie’s Coffee Shop, Wilshire and Fairfax (1956, Armet & Davis, interiors Helen Liu Fong). Closed as a restaurant in 2000 and has been a film set ever since; you have seen it in Reservoir Dogs and The Big Lebowski. A Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument since 2013.
4. Norms, La Cienega (1957, Armet & Davis). The purest surviving Armet & Davis coffee shop, with its sawtooth roof and pennant sign. Ed Ruscha painted it on fire in 1964. It was landmarked in 2015 after a demolition scare, and in late 2024 its landlord, the chicken chain Raising Cane’s, proposed converting it and swapping the sign; the plan was withdrawn within weeks after a public outcry. Still open, still 24 hours.
5. Pann’s, Ladera Heights (1958, Armet & Davis). Family-owned since it opened, with the tilted roof, the rock walls, the tropical planting and the sign all intact. If you only visit one, visit this one.
6. Chips, Hawthorne (1957, Harry Harrison). A small coffee shop with a soaring script sign, still operating, and a reminder that Googie was not only the famous firms.
7. Theme Building, LAX (1961, Pereira & Luckman with Welton Becket and Paul R. Williams). Two crossed parabolic arches holding a saucer restaurant 135 feet in the air. The restaurant closed in 2013 and the interior is rarely open, but the building is a city landmark and the arches are lit every night.
8. Cinerama Dome, Hollywood (1963, Welton Becket). A geodesic concrete dome built for the widescreen Cinerama format. Closed in 2021 and, at the time of writing, slated to reopen under new operators with the exterior preserved.
9. Union 76 Station, Beverly Hills (1965, Gin Wong). The canopy in our photograph above. Originally drawn for LAX, it is the most graceful roof ever put over a gas pump.
10. Bob’s Big Boy Broiler, Downey (1958, Paul B. Clayton). Opened as Harvey’s Broiler, later Johnie’s Broiler, and illegally half-demolished by a tenant in 2007. Preservationists forced a rebuild and it reopened in 2009, sign and all.

Beyond Los Angeles

11. Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign (1959, Betty Willis). Diamond, starburst, silver dollars for the letters of WELCOME. Listed on the National Register in 2009.
12. La Concha Motel lobby, Las Vegas (1961, Paul R. Williams). A concrete shell shaped like a scalloped clam. When the motel came down in the mid-2000s the lobby was cut into pieces, trucked up the Strip and reassembled as the visitor center of the Neon Museum, which opened in it in 2012, where it stands today surrounded by the rescued signs of a dozen vanished casinos.
13. Space Needle, Seattle (1962, John Graham & Company with Victor Steinbrueck). Built for the Century 21 Exposition, the world’s fair that made the space age a theme park. The flying-saucer top is Googie at civic scale.
14. Tomorrowland, Disneyland, Anaheim (1955, rebuilt 1967). Not a building so much as a whole district of them, including the House of the Future (1957), a four-lobed plastic house that visitors walked through by the millions.
15. Anaheim Convention Center arena (1967, Adrian Wilson). A flying saucer landed next to Disneyland, still in use.
16. The Doo Wop motels of Wildwood, New Jersey (1950s and 60s). The East Coast’s own strain of Googie, with plastic palm trees, kidney pools and names like the Caribbean, the Starlux and the Pink Champagne. A local preservation league now writes design rules to keep the look alive.
17. Elm Road Drive-In, Warren, Ohio (1949). Still showing films, still lit by a pair of gold starbursts. Googie made it to the Midwest mostly as signs, and this is one of the best.

The lost ones

18. Ship’s, Westwood (1958, Armet & Davis) and Tiny Naylor’s, Hollywood (1949, Douglas Honnold). Both demolished in 1984, within months of each other. The loss was so sudden that the Los Angeles Conservancy formed its Modern Committee in response, and that committee has been the reason every building in the survivors list is still standing.
19. Holiday Bowl, Crenshaw (1958, Armet & Davis, interiors Helen Liu Fong). A bowling alley and coffee shop that served as a meeting place for Japanese American and Black neighbors for four decades. Demolished in 2003 after a long fight; only the coffee shop facade was saved, wrapped around a chain drugstore.
20. Covina Bowl (1956, Powers, Daly and DeRosa). An Egyptian-themed Googie bowling palace with a pyramid entrance and a folded-plate roof, demolished in 2017 for townhouses. Its sign was saved. Its loss is the reason preservationists in Los Angeles now move faster.

Why almost all of it disappeared

Googie was never built to last. It was commercial architecture on leased land, built fast and cheaply, and tied to businesses that changed hands every few years. When the mood of the country shifted in the late 1960s, the style shifted with it. The moon landing made the space age feel finished rather than imminent. The ecology movement made atomic motifs feel naive. McDonald’s dropped its golden-arched buildings for brick boxes with mansard roofs in 1968, and thousands of independent operators followed, bolting shingled mansards over their folded-plate roofs so they would look “traditional.” Most of the rest was simply torn down when the lease ended.

There is a second reason, and it is the one Haskell put his finger on in 1952. The architecture profession had decided that Googie was not architecture. It did not appear in the journals, it was not taught, and when critics like Reyner Banham (Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, 1971) and Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour (Learning from Las Vegas, 1972) finally argued that the commercial strip deserved serious attention, most of the best examples were already gone.

The rediscovery

The turn came in 1985, when the architect and historian Alan Hess published Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture, the first book to treat the style as a style, with a vocabulary, a chronology and a list of buildings worth saving. He expanded it in 2004 as Googie Redux. Around the same time the Los Angeles Conservancy’s Modern Committee, formed after the Ship’s demolition, began the slow work of landmarking. The results are on the survivors list: the Theme Building in 1993, Johnie’s in 2013, Norms in 2015, the Hollywood Premiere Motel in 2025.

Something else happened in the meantime. A generation raised on The Jetsons, which premiered in 1962 and is essentially an animated Googie city, grew up and started running design studios. The style that critics called tacky became the shorthand for optimism itself. You can see it today in the retro-futurism of a hundred illustrators, in the design of Disney’s Tomorrowland refreshes, in the branding of coffee roasters and hotel chains, and in the way a certain kind of starburst clock is now the most expensive thing at the flea market.

How to see it: a one-day Los Angeles route

Start with breakfast at Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank, then drive south through the Cahuenga Pass to the Cinerama Dome on Sunset. Continue west to the Union 76 station in Beverly Hills (buy gas; it is the point). Head south on La Cienega to Norms for lunch at the counter, then east on Wilshire to Johnie’s at Fairfax, which you can only admire from the sidewalk unless a film crew is in. From there it is twenty minutes south to Pann’s on La Tijera, and ten more to the Theme Building at LAX, best at dusk when the arches light. If you have the evening, finish in Downey at the original McDonald’s and Bob’s Big Boy Broiler, which are three minutes apart. Seven buildings, roughly sixty miles, and every one of them still doing the job it was built for.

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Googie questions, answered

Is Googie the same as mid-century modern?

No, though they overlap in time and materials. Mid-century modern is a broad term for the restrained, functional design of the 1945 to 1970 period. Googie is its loud commercial cousin: the same steel and glass, used for spectacle rather than calm. A Neutra house is mid-century modern. A Neutra house with a starburst sign on a forty-foot pole would be Googie.

Is Googie the same as Populuxe or Doo Wop?

They are overlapping names for the same impulse. Populuxe was coined by the writer Thomas Hine in 1986 for the whole consumer aesthetic of the 1950s, from tailfins to boomerang tables. Doo Wop is Wildwood, New Jersey’s own name for its Googie motels. Googie is the architectural term, and the one historians use.

Where is the best place to see Googie today?

Los Angeles, without question, followed by Las Vegas (the Neon Museum holds the rescued signs) and Wildwood, New Jersey. Palm Springs, Phoenix, Albuquerque’s stretch of Route 66 and Seattle each have a handful of good examples.

Is the Space Needle Googie?

Yes, at civic scale. It was built for a world’s fair whose entire theme was the space age, its top is a flying saucer, and its designers were working from the same set of shapes as the coffee shop architects. Purists sometimes prefer “Space Age Modern” for large public buildings, but the family resemblance is not in doubt.

Why does it matter?

Because it is the built record of a moment when ordinary people believed the future would be better, and because it was made by real architects doing genuinely inventive structural work on buildings nobody expected to last. Contemporary commercial architecture has mostly given up on the idea that a gas station or a fast food restaurant should delight anyone. Googie is the proof that it can.

Go deeper

This piece is part of Retrofuturism: The Future We Were Promised, our guide to the tomorrows the past imagined. For the same optimism on paper, see Charles Schridde’s 1950s visions of the future and the space art of Robert McCall. For the same era indoors, see the space age turntables that turned living rooms into mission control and great vintage living rooms of the 1950s and 60s.

For the buildings the century did decide to take seriously, start with the world’s most extraordinary buildings, and for the vocabulary, the Glossary entries on modernism, kitsch and pop art are the three arguments Googie has been having with critics since 1952.

Further reading: Alan Hess, Googie Redux: Ultramodern Roadside Architecture (Chronicle Books, 2004); the Los Angeles Conservancy’s Modern Committee; the Neon Museum, Las Vegas.

Edited by Ben VanderVeen · About Moss & Fog