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Many tasteful people have trouble taking
Los Angeles seriously. Little wonder. Whereas Vienna had its
Secessionists, Los Angeles lays claim to dingbats (a type of nondescript
stuccoed apartment building that flourished in the fifties and sixties)
and googies (a genre of fifties coffee shop). On the other hand, as the
history of art keeps proving, a lot of tasteful people don't know a good
thing until it's gone.
....What makes L.A. such a mecca for
modernists is that modernism never had much serious competition here.
Unlike, say, Philadelphia or Charleston, where tradition holds sway and
high-quality antique structures abound, Los Angeles is a 20th-century
town.
....The very folks who get all misty-eyed over Victorian houses,
Colonial taverns, and Art Deco office buildings can be coldly
indifferent to the fate of a high-rise in the Space Age style. As for
googies, well, it's a miracle there are any left at all.
Googies are L.A.'s answer to the diner. Designed to attract the
attention of passing motorists, they take the language of modernism and
pump up the volume as high as it will go. Flat roofs bend and tilt, as
if they are being pried off; walls meet at any angle but the expected
right; neon blinks; colors shriek. Despite its beginning as a shameless
marketing gimmick, the googie later developed into a hotly debated
cause. The architect Charles Moore admired the googies' "air of
drunken abandon." The esteemed critic Esther McCoy found them
sloppy and undisciplined. Despite the prestige of its supporters,
Googie's, the style's namesake on Sunset Boulevard, designed in 1949 by
John Lautner, met its fate in 1986 with the whack of a wrecker's ball.
Other googies have endured, including the remarkable Armet Davis Newlove--designed
Pann's in Westchester, a neighborhood near L.A. International Airport,
where we wind up our tour over Dreamburgers Deluxe.
The trouble with conserving postwar buildings, even those far less
controversial than googies, lies as much with economics as aesthetics.
Property values have yet to be enhanced by a community rising up and
preventing its fifties commercial structures from being torn down....
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