Exploring the Space Age Influence on Googie Style

When Google first showed up on the Internet, I had to take a second look because I thought they were talking about “Googie.”

Before I was born and during my first years of life, there was a strong fascination with futuristic design and architecture.

It was especially prevalent (at least to me) when cars started having fins designed into them. The first satellite, Sputnik, was sent up in space to orbit the earth. Soon the original seven Mercury astronauts were announced and began launching out of Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The Jetsons space age family was introduced on our television sets and more people became gaga over Googie.

Our family would drive up to a new hamburger restaurant nearby called Whataburger. To me, I felt like were were going to a space station to eat.

Googie architecture became a prominent style of mid-century modern futurism that originated in Southern California during the late 1940s and flourished until the early 1970s.

Heavily influenced by the era’s post-WWII tech-utopian optimism, car culture, the Atomic Age, and the Space Race, Googie design was intentionally flashy, commercial, and egalitarian.

It was used to make everyday roadside businesses like diners, car washes, gas stations, and motels instantly pop out to passing motorists.

The term was coined in 1952 by architecture critic Douglas Haskell, who used it after driving past Googies Coffee Shop in West Hollywood—a striking, sharp-angled cafe designed by legendary modern architect John Lautner.

The style built on exaggeration; on dramatic angles; on plastic and steel and neon and wide-eyed technological optimism.

It drew even more inspiration from Space Age ideals and rocketship dreams.

We saw Googie at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the Space Needle in Seattle, the Tower of the Americas in San Antonio, the mid-century design of Disneyland’s Tomorrowland and in countless coffee shops and motels across the U.S.