just googie it

by Art Chantry ( art@artchantry.com)

this is what you get when you mate a WW2 quonset hut with a pole barn – the jetsons! this is something i found tossed into a file chock full of clippings of ‘shopping architecure’ (full of photos of people shopping clipped from old LIFE magazines). judging from the the quality of the image and the registration marks you can see, i think this was an old printer’s proof of an industrial designer’s (or perhaps graphic design ot even architect’s) rendering of an unfulfilled project design for some client long past. i imagine the client (the client’s wife didn’t like the colors because it clashed with her new wardrobe) rejected it and that was that.

AC:i've always objected tot he word 'googie'. i think it lumps all the efforts of major stylists and designers into one big generic authorless lump. these were designs that erupted from shared cultural experience and all just happened to seem similar to the uneducated eye. then they came up with a silly name for it. sorta like 'retro'. ( AC)

back in the olden daze of yore, before the labor-saving devices we call “computers” (ha! little joke there. did you catch it?), this sort of work was all done by hand – drawn or constructed. there were many many ways of approaching it and this example is particularly nice and crisp. usually, these things are more of a sketch rather than a beautiful crisp image like this. but, this looks like a carefully crafted piece of mechanical art of some sort. at any rate, this design is really gorgeous and truly wonderful, don’t you think? it’s REALLY cool. there is something about the direct hand-eye dialog that allows direct design thinking that really can’t be matched on a computer keyboard. i mean, i can’t imagine a computer jockey making an image that looks like this without copy-catting. this is a total direct design thought process that creates this sort of work and craftsmanship. this is beauty personified.

after world war two, we took all sorts of ideas developed as part of the war effort and adapted them to peacetime use – the jeep, quick printing, fast heavy construction, bright flourescent colors etc. then designers fresh from the battlefield would ‘decorate’ them into application. of course, after years of privation (the depression) and warfare (ww2), everybody wanted to leave the awful past behind and we all began to think about THE FUTURE. never mind that future never got here (largely because the ‘greatest generation’ spent it all up). we still tried to push our culture into an almost science fiction idea of what we were going to do. it was so childish and charming.

the bottom line is that this is just a quonset hut (a military fast-build structure made out of a big sheet of corregated tin bent over a primitive frame.) the rest is just color and decoration. but, look what wonders a snappy design mind can do to a primitive storage unit. ever since the grocery store chain called “piggly wiggly’ introduced the idea of ‘self-serve” (basically they were the first large chain store to allow you simply push a basket and pick out your own grocery selection from the shelf. they also introduced the shopping cart), grocery stores had become larger and more centralized in the community. with the massive influx of returning soldiers and expanding families, grocery stores also had to grow and expand and still somehow be attractive enough to compete. that’s where ‘the future’ came into the picture. given the choice of walking into ‘smith’s grocery’ on the neighborhood corner, versus attending this ‘gala fantasy of what’s to come’, which would you rather go do? which is more FUN!? never mind that the massive volume at the big box stores could reduce prices down to a fraction of mr. smith’s store on the corner. in effect, it was the beginnings of the destruction of our american small-town neighborhood community.


now we all have big cement boxes with a little logo attached to the upper right hand corner that we attend (think “costco, fred meyer, kmart…”). these new grocery stores are HUGE, the square footage of one store covers what would have been your entire neighborhood in the past. the prices are viciously reduced so that even grocery chains with stores as big as this kohl’s market were squeezed out of business (profit margins are down to fractions of a penny). the beehive has even replaced the SUPERmarket (i’ll post a selection of “modern” big box store signage design for comparison after i’m done here.) i think we stopped being ‘citizens’ and became ‘consumers’ about the time the big box chains began to dominate our community life.

sometimes you can visit small towns and see some of these old postwar grocery store supermarket structures still standing – usually adapted to secondary use as a thrift store or some auto repair shop or something. sometimes, they’ll even still have the old signage and the decor, sun-faded with chunks broken out of it. whenever i see these old buildings i imagine what they must have been like in their prime, when they were the center of community life. i also know the next time i drive through that town and past that old supermarket quonset hut/pole barn/jetson’s fantasy, it’ll probably be gone. and nobody will notice it missing except me.

ADDENDUM:

so little of this era of design still survives in seattle, that it’s sort of joke that there is a ‘seattle googie’ website. i mean to say that the space needle is NO+T googie. at all. it’s just some ignorant wanna be that has listed the century 21 stuff as googie, ya know? there was a brief period of time (i remember it well) when the whole city turned “century 21″. everywhere you went was this amazing space age ‘not-quite-jetson’s” architecture design and decoration everywhere in the city. most of the buildings were built on the fast and cheap for the fair and almost all of it is gone after the last 20 years of mass destruction in seattle. but, the whole city looked liek the space needle for a very brief time….

…’zig-zag’ modern? it’s usually called ‘googie’ by the ignorant as well. but, the northwest was an epicenter of z


g modern work – a style that lasted maybe six months in popularity. there area couple of partial remains left here in tacoma that still take my breathe away it was so extreme. so much if it has been covered up by modern ‘awnings’ built on to hide the zigzag style, that it’s hard to find. you need to know where to look….

…maybe the very best surviving example of zigzag modern architecture in the northwest is “bowlero” lanes – a bowling alley just off so. tacoma way on steilacoom blvd. the old (absolutely magnificent) zigzag modern neon sign has been torn down and replaced by a little backlit piece of shit. but, tif you look past that parking lot and all the new signs and modern paint colors (earth tones), you can still see how intense that building look back in my youth. that was like a zigzag modern nightmare building. amazing thing….

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