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Chain restaurants act as a barometer of
the public mood.... The fifties was a time for brashness at most levels
of design. Certainly, those who set the tone for serious discussion
within the architectural profession indulged in their own celebration of
the bold and bright.
By the beginning of the 1960s, however, the profusion of clashing modern
forms had started to incur a public backlash. In January, 1961, the
prominent conservative political philosopher Russell Kirk told the
nation's architects that "we have done more damage to our country's
artificial and natural beauty since the Second World War than we were
able to accomplish in the hundred years preceding." ....The jurors
for Progressive Architecture's 1961 design awards worried whether the
architectural profession had descended into chaos....
Aggressive experimentation with modern
forms persisted in some quarters, but the buoyancy of a few years
earlier began to dissipate. Flamboyant structural modernism no longer
symbolized unquestionably beneficial new possibilities. This change of
attitude stemmed partly from architectural considerations: the bold
structures had been around long enough, and become common enough, to be
judged more coolly now.
In addition, the country simply was not quite in the same mood by the
early 1960s. The election of President Kennedy indicated a degree of
dissatisfaction with existing conditions. Concern about the country's
faults and inequities manifested itself in new forms of social criticism
and political action. Architecture--particularly popular
architecture--responds to shifts in the emotional climate, and in the
early 1960s it became evident that designs imbued with a brash futurism
no longer fit as well as they had. Restaurants started drifting to other
kinds of images--strong, immediately recognizable images, but less
technological, less like the hardware of tomorrow.
The transformation was most noticeable at first in coffee
shops--establishments that offered full menus and relatively quick
service at counters and at tables or booths, often twenty-four hours a
day. In the 1950s southern California had spawned what came to be known
as the California coffee shop--a restaurant whose dramatic roof,
hovering above the glass walls of the dining area, called out to
motorists on freeways and commercial strips. A Los Angeles architectural
firm, Armet & Davis, became the acknowledged master of the
California coffee-shop style, creating bold forms and bright interiors
for chains like Denny's and Big Boy, first in California and then, as
these organizations expanded, throughout the nation.
Thomas Wells, an architect in Honolulu, helped bring to an end such
brash coffee-shop design. Wells designed restaurants but refused to
produce anything in the customary California style--"weird plaster
shape meaning absolutely nothing," as he puts it. To Wells the
aggressively conspicuous coffee shops of a chain like Denny's
represented "just a cheap Las Vegas approach to architecture,"
an attitude of "anything goes."
In 1964 a California restaurant executive, John McIntosh, asked Wells to
design a coffee shop--eventually called Coco's.... For the first of the
new coffee shops, Wells designed a dining room that had leather-like
upholstered booths under a wood and cork ceiling, with indirect
lighting. Wood columns framed the windows, which came together at the
corners, with mitered gas. The floor of the entrance and the counter
area was covered in squares of textured brown tile. The dining room had
earth-tone carpeting instead of the terrazzo floors found in most coffee
shops.... He bermed the earth up to the bottom of the big windows and
gave the building broad overhangs. The roof rose at a gentle, even
pitch, then curved upward at the top, hiding the air-handling equipment
in a center roof well. The restaurant opened in January, 1966.... Coco's
would ultimately grow into a chain of more than 200 coffee shops
distinguished by a soft, somewhat residential flavor.
Wells's work had a major impact on other chains and other architects,
particularly on Robert Colwell and Larry Ray, two architects who quit
Armet & Davis in 1962 to start their own firm. In 1964 Colwell &
Ray moved from Los Angeles to Orange County, not far from the site of
the first Coco's. Ray, the firm's principal designer, often produced
coffee shops in a style similar to Armet & Davis's, with whipped-up
interiors of hot pink and orange and with emphatic roofs covered by
colored stripes of gravel....
But Ray had qualms about such a flashy
approach. In 1967, emboldened by the successful example of Coco's, Ray
and Colwell developed a design for a more composed, restrained,
"neighborhood Denny's" and presented it to Butler, hoping he'd
buy it and build it. According to Ray, Butler's initial reaction was
We're not in that kind of business, but the architects kept after him
until eventually he agreed to give the new design a try.
Inside the experimental Denny's were wood beams, wood trim, a working
fireplace, tables whose plastic laminate tops were decorated in wood
patterns, and a floor that was carpeted rather than surfaced in
terrazzo. Outside, the walls were covered with oversized reddish-brown
bricks. The roof of charcoal-gray barrel tiles had deep overhangs, and
it rose gently from all four sides, like a low pyramid that had been
truncated at the top. It climbed just high enough for the air-handling
equipment to sit out of sight in a center roof well. A rough-sawn fascia
board rising from the edges of the roof well would provide a
natural-looking backing for a Denny's sign, if a sign were wanted. The
company called the new style of building its Intowner model and
initially used it where more flamboyant Denny's designs would have run
into community resistance. In a few years the Intowner and models like
it would become a major part of the Denny's operation.
Even the king of coffee-shop architecture, Armet & Davis, began
edging away from boisterous buildings with free-flowing roofs. In 1968
the firm produced an enlarged version of California ranch house for
Bob's Big Boy restaurants. It featured a regular pitched roof of clay
tile and exterior walls surfaced in small beige blocks of slump-stone--a
plump-sided southwestern building product made of concrete, intended to
resemble blocks at adobe. The ceiling was of wood with exposed beams,
and the floors were covered with a mixture of quarry tile and carpeting.
This design....brought Armet & Davis into the realm of residential
imagery, though its work didn't become entirely sedate. Several versions
of the design included a tall gable-wall of glass, and the interiors
retained some of the cheery energy of the earlier Big Boys.
The influence of Coco's continued to penetrate the restaurant industry.
Tom Wells, looking at the changed landscape in the 1980s, jokes, "I
feel like I designed the whole country."
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