Googie architecture: primitive futurism, with upswept roofs from Frank Lloyd Wright

No exploration of American culture's distinctive "primitive futurism" would be complete without a look at Googie architecture of the Midcentury period -- usually defined by its Space Age and other futuristic elements. Off-kilter angles, cantilevered upswept roofs, Industrial Age materials of glass and steel and neon lights, shapes and motifs (like starbursts) suggesting rockets or spaceships or space stations, and an overall busy frenetic energy level.

And yet it just wouldn't be American without pronounced primitive elements as well. Rarely does the discussion about this Midcentury style emphasize them, and their seeming contradiction with the Space Age elements.

Googie came from the same time and place -- the Midcentury, out West -- as tiki culture, which was purely primitivist, an attempt to root our still-developing identity in the ancient times of the New World, including Polynesia, rather than the Old World (just as the Mayan revival style of the '20s had done, or the ahead-of-its-time Book of Mormon's genesis narrative had done circa 1830). Googie fused this primitive / tropical theme with the also contemporaneous Space Age / Industrial Age / Streamline theme.

In the Penguin coffee shop below (built in 1959), the dramatic upswept roof (being cantilevered, and so appearing to defy gravity and take flight), wall-o'-windows, neon lights on the sign, and the busily off-center placement of items on the sign, give this building a futuristic feel that could not have even been imagined 100 years earlier.

However, Americans have never defined ourselves as strictly futuristic, progressive, etc., hence the need for the ancient and primitive elements -- tropical vegetation, and massive piers faced in flagstone to support the roof. The stones are not finely cut into rectangular prisms and then laid in regular courses like advanced stonework -- they appear to be used as they were found, with human ingenuity only playing a role in fitting them together like puzzle pieces.

This is not the masonry of an advanced civilization of several thousand years ago -- let alone one capable of splitting the atom and sending rockets to escape Earth's orbit. This far cruder form of assembling the stones together leavens the head-spinning futurism of the other elements. Crude and raw -- yet also advanced and sophisticated -- in its construction. That's what American identity is all about.

In fact, from some angles, these Googie buildings primarily consist of primitive elements and crude techniques, not so Space Age-y after all:

This combination of primitive with futuristic continued on the inside, where large expanses of flagstone walls gave a familiar cozy feel to the starkly-angled interior space, with rough natural textures and earthy colors balancing the smooth and dyed-any-color synthetic materials. Just as the woodgrain tabletops balanced the gleaming stainless steel / chrome pedestal supports.

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I was glad to find one quote to this effect already out there: "these were places where George Jetson and Fred Flintstone could meet over a cup of coffee" (Alan Hess, Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture, quoted here). The Jetsons and the Flintstones were both highly popular TV shows, and helped define American identity of the time and ever since. Their co-existence is no accident: Americans are part caveman, part spaceman, with no stage of material cultural development in between -- that would be Europeans, and because we are not European, we have had to define ourselves as belonging to the time periods outside of the heyday of European empires.

There were never mighty empires and advanced civilizations where Americans landed and settled, and we have always had to wrestle with the absence of counterparts to Ancient Greek temples, Medieval castles, and Early Modern cathedrals in our newly settled land. Part of our response was to borrow from those civilizations in the New World that did build monumental architecture that was still easily visible and tangible, like the Maya of Central America or the later Easter Islanders off the Pacific coast of South America.

But mainly our response was to go with the obvious theme, that we were bringing an advanced civilization to a mostly primitive environment. Not necessarily like taming a desert environment to make it suitable for agriculture. We didn't build spaceships out of the primitive environment we found on arrival -- it's more like the advanced technology appeared to have been dropped from the sky by some civilizational stork.

Americans project that founding myth back onto other civilizations, when we assume that the Ancient Egyptians must have had their advanced tech for pyramid-building dropped upon them by ancient aliens. It may sound silly, but it makes sense when you consider our historical path, and the absence of intermediate stages of material development between the primitive and industrial in America. We just assume that every civilization in history has been dropped from the sky, mostly pre-fabricated, like ours was.

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Finally, where *did* all of these dramatically upswept roofs, heavily cantilevered, come from -- if not aliens? You should already know the answer by now, given his all-encompassing influence on American architecture, but -- that's right -- they were invented by Frank Lloyd Wright himself, back in the Midwest. As far as I can tell, anyway, from searching around for "upswept roofs", and I'm happy to be corrected.

I don't know from my limited study of Googie examples which one was the first to employ the upswept roof, but Wright had all of them beat anyway -- the Robert and Rae Levin House from 1949, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. While most of the roof is flat, as was his style, a pronounced section of it soars up toward one of the edges, is not supported vertically at the outer edge, and contains a wall-o'-windows underneath, exactly as would become the norm with Googie in the next decade.

Even more Googie than that is the Elam House from only one year later, 1950, in Austin, Minnesota. This one has the doubly upswept roof, rising toward opposite edges and having a low-point in the middle of the roof, which is off-center / asymmetric. It's also cantilevered, supported by massive stone piers -- the only difference from Googie being their finer level of cutting and dressing, instead of being used as they were found, in the cruder Googie fashion, and so not looking quite as primitive. (But then, this is only the Midwest, not the Pacific coast, where the tropical primitive environment is more evident.) It has a wall-o'-windows underneath as well.

In 1952, at the Reisley House in Pleasantville, New York, he added a bit of functionality to the upswept roof, turning it into the cover for a carport. (He also changed the material to be cypress wood panels, adding to the primitive side of the balance.) The pier supporting the cantilevered roof is again stone, though more Googie-esque in using stones of uneven size, albeit still in rectangular outlines. It really did take the Googie movement to make them look unaltered and crudely assembled at varying angles.

I couldn't easily find other examples throughout the '50s, perhaps because he had seen it evolve into Googie -- and then elevated Modernist airport terminals from Eero Saarinen, like Dulles and the TWA Flight Center at JFK -- and figured his pioneering work was done. However, he was still at it circa 1960, when he built the Don Stromquist House in Bountiful, Utah. One corner of the roof rises toward the edge, is cantilevered, and contains a wall-o'-windows underneath.

California Googie architect John Lautner had apprenticed under Wright in the '30s, though I don't know if he was still keeping tabs on what his mentor was up to circa 1950 with three out of dozens of Usonian homes. It's possible that the moment for upswept roofs had come, and Wright was simply an early pioneer, while it came to others later but independently as part of a general zeitgeist. But there is a potential direct channel from Wright to Googie-style roofs that is worth looking into (for someone else).

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And we must remember to hit on the other big-picture lesson from my survey of modern architecture -- the non-existent role played by the Europeans, whether affiliated with Bauhaus or otherwise. Clueless and embarrassed-to-be-American East Coast academics may hear "upswept roof" and "Modern architecture," and think of Notre-Dame du Haut by Le Corbusier. But that was built in 1955 -- half a decade after Wright pioneered the look in the American Midwest with multiple examples, as usual. It's also not as cantilevered as Wright's proto-Googie buildings, being supported at the outer corner.

For that matter, the supposed avant-garde of Bauhaus had been beaten to the punch by literal McDonald's, whose 1953 oldest building in Downey, California employed an upward-sloping roof -- along with prominent parabolas over a decade before Saarinen's Gateway Arch was built.

Civilization-shaping cultural creativity comes from expanding empires, and by the 20th century, the Euro empires had all bitten the dust, except for Russia, which didn't start its collapse until the final decade of that century. America was still rising, expanding, and innovating. If something cool or inventive happened, just assume that we did it (or maybe a Russian counterpart), not the collapsed empires with no gas left in the tank. Their heyday was several centuries earlier.

Whether trad or mod, Europeans simply had nothing to invent during the 20th C., although if they came under American aegis post-WWII, they could jump on our bandwagon and contribute that way -- which many of them did, enthusiastically, since our cultural scene was the only game in town, aside from Russia's.

We can't get too triumphalist, though, since our empire has begun collapsing as well. We aren't going to invent anything else ever again. That means our job is to preserve what has already been built in our national distinctive style, such as Googie (or Brutalism, Art Deco, Streamline, Prairie School, Mission, etc.). And if anything new needs to be built, then produce new examples of those established styles. That's how the Mormons are treating their temples -- old and new alike -- and that's how we should treat our buildings as an entire nation.

Fortunately in the case of Googie, it was most prolific in Southern California, which is the most preservationist region of the country, to their envy-making credit. If there's even a rumor about someone taking down the giant donut from what used to be a roadside vernacular diner, City Council will block them. And they have probably already made a preemptive move by getting the building legally protected as a landmark, making it sacrosanct, untouchable, and inviolable.

Nowhere else in the country conserves its American culture like L.A., which is why Brutalism is being systematically razed all along the East Coast, while UC Irvine will always look like it's from the Planet of the Apes, primitive yet futuristic at the same time -- and for all time.