High technology entered the popular consciousness in the 1950s and 60s. The USA and USSR were engaged in the Space Race, competing for technological supremacy. The imagery of space travel leaked into American culture and this era came to be known as the Space Age.
Design started to flirt with sci-fi imagery and a new style developed that was known as Googie. It was named after a coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard. The style is sometimes called populuxe, which is a contraction of "popular luxury." The science fiction writer William Gibson referred to it as Raygun Gothic. It was a futuristic architecture influenced by the Space Age and it expressed a naïve enthusiasm for technology and the future.
The Space Needle in Seattle, Washington, was built for the 1962 World's Fair and was designed by Victor Steinbrueck. It borrows from contemporary sci-fi imagery. The tower has a soaring verticality and terminates with a form directly inspired by the image of a flying saucer. It is cantilevered out from the supporting tower, showing off the structural possibilities. For a while this was the tallest building west of the Mississippi. It had a restaurant at the top, called the SkyCity restaurant, which rotated. The building functioned as a machine.
Googie was characterized by space-age iconography like flying saucers and atoms. It reflected America's fascination with space travel. Googie was popular with the young rock and roll generation and was used for the sites of youth culture: cinemas, diners and bowling alleys.
One of the most famous Googie buildings is at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) designed by James Langenheim (1961). It has parabolic arches supporting the tower. They are very expressive, suggesting the orbital path of sub-atomic particles around a nucleus.
The style was very cartoonish and it was actually used for the architecture in the JetsonsDisneyland in Anaheim, California had a section called Tomorrowland, which was designed in the Googie style. cartoon series. It was also used by the Disney Corporation. The original
The style filtered down to more everyday designs. This Cadillac has fins that emulate the aerodynamic features of rocket ships. It also has tail lights that imitate the jets of flame from a rocket. A very famous design was the Astro Lamp (1965). This is overtly designed in the form of a rocket ship, but as a lava lamp it has gelatinous shapes moving inside in an approximation of galaxies and nebulae.
A more respectable example was the TWA Flight Center at JFK airport, designed by Eero Saarinen (1962). This has expressive sculptural curves reminiscent of electro-magnetic waves.
Googie was not taken seriously at the time or since, but it has gained a cult following. It was revived in the Tim Burton film, Mars Attacks. More recently, Futurama used a similar retro-futurist look.
