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Bezig met laden... Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecturedoor Alan Hess
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Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. Googie is a term that refers to the spage age or ultra modern style that prevailed, in Southern California especially, from about the 30's through the 60's. The name Googie was taken from a coffee shop on Sunset Blvd. designed by John Lautner in 1949. This book isn't just coffee shops, there are other restaurants, car dealerships, homes and cars that display the influence of Googie with restaurants looking like tail fins and cars resembling rocket ships. Raised in Garden Grove, a lot of this was nostalgic for me. Googie was all around when I was a kid, especially as we were just minutes from Disneyland with all the surrounding cheap motels designed to look like the solar system or Aladdin's lamp. These unique structures remained until Disneyland bought all of land around 1999- 2000, and wiped them out. And there in this book was a picture of the Bob's Big Boy in Garden Grove, with it's fat boy statue and Swiss cheese signage, that Mom took my sister and me to on Fridays when Dad worked late. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
The euphoria about the future that followed World War II permeated the outlooks of architects, who, influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright and with ready access to remarkable new construction material and building techniques spawned by the war technologies, faced the intriguing prospect of redesigning the postwar world. Initially the futuristic designs were outrageous, and detractors labeled these structures the Googie School of Architecture after a particularly outlandish coffee shop in Los Angeles. Googie would seem far from outlandish today, as those once controversial design elements have become commonplace in both commercial and residential architecture. Author Alan Hess traces the evolution of these early postwar designs in a lively yet learned essay profusely illustrated with both color and black-and-white photography. Googie:Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture is a nostalgic trip back to the Fifties and a look forward at the architectural future.--From publisher description. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)725.710973The arts Architecture Public structures Hospitality, AmusementLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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In linking the ’30s with the styles of the ’50s, Hess writes, “Wright and Goff choreographed a flow of movement that carried you along, making you aware of each space and transition. Uninterrupted by conventional doors, walls, corners, or windows, space flows continuously around the next corner and outside. This is the final destruction of the box originally called for by Frank Lloyd Wright. It is also the three-dimensional architecture historian Sigfried Giedion identified with Modernism: buildings perceived as a totality only as one moved through and around them” (pg. 85). He features extensive photographs to demonstrate how these styles opened up and blended both the liminal space of outside/inside as well as merging Earth with sky and linking the roadway to the parking lot.
Writing in the 1980s, when fashions began changing again and moving further away from Googie, Hess described how it was subject to criticism even in its own time. He writes, “The one certain difference between high art and commercial vernacular architecture was the quality of the rhetoric surrounding it. The high art establishment used talented critics and the established journals to let people know what their buildings were about” (pg. 94). Googie, for all its visual language, served primarily commercial and advertising interests and did not appeal to critics. Redevelopment in the 1980s lead to the demolition or repurposing of much of the surviving examples.
Hess’s book will appeal to all those interested in the styles of the postwar era and how the architectural arts blended with advertising and commercialism. Hess’s book thematically follows Roland Marchand’s work, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940. Hess blends analysis with images, though several of the images that appear behind text are often too dark and make the text difficult to read. Otherwise, this is a good early study of ’50s architecture. ( )