Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture by Alan Hess Haskell’s disdain for Googie was clearly rooted in his hatred for the flourishes and perceived tackiness of Hollywood. After all, they are working in Hollywood, and Hollywood has let them know what it expects of them.” Think of it! - Googie is produced by architects, not by ambitious mechanics, and some of these architects starve for it. “You underestimate the seriousness of Googie. Haskell, writing sarcastically as Professor Thrugg:
Haskell was an advocate of modernism, but a modernism constrained by his ideas of taste and refinement. The New York-based Haskell wrote part of his article, “Googie Architecture,” in the voice of a fictional Professor Thrugg, whose over-the-top praise was an indictment of Googie’s popular appeal. Architecture critic Douglas Haskell was the first to use “Googie” to describe the architectural movement, after driving by the West Hollywood coffee shop and finally feeling like he had found a name for this style that was flourishing in the postwar era.īut Haskell was no fan of Googie and wrote a scathing (by architecture critic standards) satire of the style in the February 1952 issue of House and Home magazine. Oddly enough, Googie was used as a deragatory term almost from the start - born in Southern California and named for a West Hollywood coffee shop designed in 1949 by John Lautner, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright. Googie is an odd word a funny word a word that feels like it’s doing a few vowel-drenched laps around your tongue before finally flopping out of your mouth. We find Googie at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the Space Needle in Seattle, the mid-century design of Disneyland’s Tomorrowland, in Arthur Radebaugh‘s postwar illustrations, and in countless coffee shops and motels across the U.S. It draws inspiration from Space Age ideals and rocketship dreams. It’s a style built on exaggeration on dramatic angles on plastic and steel and neon and wide-eyed technological optimism.
Googie is a modern (ultramodern, even) architectural style that helps us understand post-WWII American futurism - an era thought of as a “golden age” of futurist design for many here in the year 2012. I didn’t know the word, but I definitely knew the style. In fact, when a friend - a native Californian - used the term I initially thought it must have something to do with Google. The project currently contains 45 font files spanning 9 distinctive visual styles (Roman, Italic, Infant, Infant Italic, Garamond, Garamond Italic, Upright Cursive, Small Caps, and Unicase) and 5 weights (Light, Regular, Medium, SemiBold, and Bold).The Theme Building at the Los Angeles International Airport, built in 1961īefore I moved to Los Angeles (almost 2 years ago now) I had never heard the word Googie. This kind of Serif is featured on more than 2,000,000 websites, and it is the most popular in the USA.
FUTURISTIC THEMES OF GOOGLE FREE
Learn More Cormorant Garamond Cormorant Garamond Serif FontĬhristian Thalmann is the name of the person who developed this free display type family. Libre Baskerville is featured in more than 3,000,000 websites, and Google API displayed the font over 263M times in the last week, and Google API displayed the font over 263M times in the last week. Libre Baskerville is a web font optimized for body text (typically 16px.) It is based on the American Type Founder’s Baskerville from 1941, yet it has a taller x-height, wider counters, and somewhat less contrast that enable it to function great for reading on-screen. Impallari Type has designed Libre Baskerville.