Googie architecture: the roadside style that sold the future

Googie architecture is the bright, tilted, space-age style of postwar Southern California roadsides, seen above all in coffee shops and drive-in restaurants designed to catch the eye of a driver passing at speed. It took its name from a single Los Angeles coffee shop, and the Getty notes that the label started out as a put-down. This guide covers where the name came from, how to identify the style on the street, which buildings still stand and what protects them, and how Googie differs from mainstream mid-century modern.

What is Googie architecture?

Googie is a commercial, car-oriented strand of mid-century modern design. The Getty’s Overdrive exhibition credits Armet & Davis, Douglas Honnold, Wayne McAllister and others with reshaping auto-oriented design in the 1950s, with restaurants inspired by the era’s automotive and aerospace technology. Their tools were eye-catching signs, big glass facades, and undulating, cantilevered roofs. Inside, they mixed natural materials and lush planting into the same dynamic spaces, all to win the attention of passing drivers.

The Los Angeles Conservancy sums up the Armet & Davis coffee shops in four ingredients: space-age decorative elements, dramatic rooflines, glass walls and bright signage aimed at passing motorists. The building and its sign worked as the restaurant’s advertisement.

The style was most popular in the 1950s and 1960s, according to the Conservancy. It was not only a Los Angeles look. The Conservancy notes that Googie-style McDonald’s stands, with twin golden arches and red and white tiled exteriors, were once a fixture in most American suburbs.

Where did the name “Googie” come from?

The Getty’s two accounts give the story in three steps:

• 1949: Googies coffee shop. John Lautner, then near the beginning of his solo career, designed Googies at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights in Los Angeles. The Getty says the design helped redefine roadside commercial architecture. The building has since been demolished.
• 1952: Haskell’s article. According to the Getty, the writer and editor Douglas Haskell coined the term “Googie” in House and Home magazine to define the new style appearing throughout Southern California.
• From insult to landmark. The Getty’s Overdrive exhibition says the word was “coined as a disparaging term” for a new type of roadside commercial building, and that Googie has since become a much-loved part of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Conservancy now uses Googie as a style category in its listings of historic places.

The Getty adds that Lautner is primarily recognized for his houses, not his commercial work.

What are the characteristics of Googie architecture?

Use this checklist on the street. Three or more of these features together point strongly to Googie.

• A dramatic roofline. Roofs tilt, angle, undulate or seem to hover, often cantilevered well past the walls. The Conservancy describes Johnie’s sharply angled, striped-front roof, the immense, hovering roof over Pann’s that it likens to a tortoise shell, and the hovering angular canopy of the demolished Ships in Westwood. For how roof slope is measured, see our guide to roof pitch angles.
• Space-age and geometric motifs. At Norms La Cienega, a saw-tooth pennant sign echoes the diamond-shaped roofline, and the architects repeated the geometric motifs inside. The 1953 McDonald’s in Downey has two sheet-metal parabolic arches 30 ft (9.1 m) high that pierce the wedge of its roof and were first outlined in pink neon.
• A huge neon sign. The sign is treated as part of the architecture. The neon sign at Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank is 35 ft (10.7 m) tall, and the Conservancy counts it as an integral part of the building. Johnie’s has a huge neon sign, and Pann’s has an animated neon sign that tilts off the vertical.
• Glass walls. Big sheets of plate glass open the dining room to the street. At Norms, diners look out through glass walls at subtropical planting, and at Downey, canted plate glass around the kitchen put food preparation on public view.
• Natural materials and planting. Pann’s has terrazzo floors, flagstone walls and planters rising out of the ground, the hallmarks of the California coffee shop in the Conservancy’s description. Armet & Davis also used custom artwork in new materials such as plastics and resins.

Who were the main Googie architects?

• John Lautner designed Googies (1949), which gave the style its name.
• Armet & Davis. Louis Armet and Eldon Davis started their practice in 1947. Before 1970 they designed coffee shops, homes, markets, shopping centers, country clubs and even churches, according to the Conservancy, including the best-known Googie coffee shops: Johnie’s, Norms La Cienega and Pann’s. The Conservancy credits Helen Fong alongside the firm on Norms and Pann’s.
• Wayne McAllister designed Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank (1949), early Las Vegas hotels such as El Rancho Vegas and the Sands, and many Los Angeles restaurants and coffee shops.
• Douglas Honnold is named by the Getty as one of the architects who reshaped auto-oriented design in the 1950s.
• Stanley Clark Meston, a commercial architect from Fontana who had once worked for McAllister, designed the 1953 McDonald’s in Downey for the McDonald brothers.
• Martin Stern Jr. designed Ships coffee shop in Westwood, demolished in 1984.

Where can you still see Googie architecture?

The table lists well-documented survivors, with the official status given by heritage sources. “Historic-Cultural Monument” (HCM) is the City of Los Angeles landmark designation. Downey’s McDonald’s has been determined eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, which is not the same as being listed.

A few notes on the table:

• Johnie’s dates. The Getty dates the completion of Romeo’s Times Square to 1955, and the Conservancy gives 1956. The building later became Ram’s, became Johnie’s in 1966, and the business operated until 2000.
• Norms’ future. The Conservancy reports that Raising Cane’s bought the building in 2021 and has leased it to Norms since then. In December 2024, after community opposition, the company asked to postpone a presentation to the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission of plans to rehabilitate the building for its own restaurant use; that is the Conservancy’s latest update. As an HCM, the building has strong protection from demolition and inappropriate alteration, but the designation does not control how it is used.
• The Theme Building’s style. The Conservancy files it as Expressionist and Mid-Century Modern, not Googie. Its UFO-like restaurant hangs from the center of two crossed arches, so it shares Googie’s space-age imagery at airport scale.
• The Space Needle opened on April 21, 1962, the first day of the Seattle World’s Fair. Its flying-saucer-shaped top house came from architect John Graham Jr. and his team. It belongs to the same space-age moment rather than to the roadside coffee shop tradition.

For more landmark buildings across eras, see our list of famous buildings.

Googie vs mid-century modern vs Space Age landmarks

These labels overlap, and writers often use them loosely. This is how they differ in practice.

Put simply, Googie takes the glass walls and new materials of postwar modernism and exaggerates the roof and the sign for the commercial strip. To place Googie among other movements, see our overview of types of architecture.

Why was so much Googie architecture demolished?

The Conservancy says many Googie coffee shops were lost as the optimistic postwar style fell out of popularity. Chains also changed their branding, and land on busy commercial streets found new uses:

• Ships, Westwood. Martin Stern Jr.’s coffee shop, admired for its hovering angular roof canopy and glass walls, was bulldozed in 1984 for the 22-story Center West office tower. Its loss, together with the demolition of the 1949 Tiny Naylors coffee shop, led the Conservancy to form a volunteer Fifties Task Force that same year. That group is now its Modern Committee.
• McDonald’s, Downey. As McDonald’s Corporation changed its branding and design rules, Googie-style stands were demolished or heavily altered. The Downey stand survived intact because the McDonald brothers franchised it themselves. When the corporation closed it in 1994, campaigns by the Conservancy and the Downey Historical Society helped save it.
• Norms La Cienega. In December 2014 a new owner filed a demolition permit. The Conservancy nominated the building, and the City Council designated it an HCM.

Googie also belongs to a longer line of styles that were mocked when new and valued later. Critics attacked Art Nouveau’s ornament as excessive too, as our guide to Art Nouveau architecture explains.