Back to the New Grind
Coffee service industry and architectural trends
By Randy Brown
Buildings, January, 1997, No. 1, Vol. 91; Pg. 26

Good to the last voltage drop, coffee culture is grounded in the future.

Most buildings professionals don't realize that coffee, the rocket fuel that powers them toward success every morning, once drove a revolution in architectural taste.

Tastes change, of course, as does technology.

In the 1950s and '60s, the future was a place of streamlined glass and chrome, just down the street and around the corner. Oversized signs, blazing neon, and boomerang roofs were as American as Mom, apple pie, and the slice of the tail fins on a '59 Caddy.

Our buildings took design cues from the latest technologies, shapeshifting first into the streamlined curves of the airplane industry, then lifting off into the Space Age.

Coffee shops such as Denny's, Dimy's, Norm's, and Biff's lighted the way to the future. One chain even lent, for better or worse, its name to the style. So-called "Googie" architecture featured design elements that could easily be recognized through the windshield, and that erased the walls between dining and parking.

Where the Bauhaus and other modernist movements were sterile and cold, their distant cousin Googie celebrated the popular, friendly expression of technology.

Now, however, the future looks pretty dated.

Starbursts and boomerangs, sputniks and zigzags no longer serve to pull us off the strip for a burger and fries. "We don't just need buildings with good taste," laments commercial archeologist Alan Hess, who wrote a book on Googie. "We need buildings that taste good."