Googie

English

A Googie coffee shop (1956)

McDonald's restaurant (1953)

Etymology

From Googie's Coffee Shop, name of a now-defunct coffee shop in West Hollywood, from the nickname of the original owner's wife.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈɡuːɡi/

• Audio (General American):

  (file)

Adjective

Googie (not comparable)

1. Of a style of futurist modern American commercial architecture, popular from the 1950s to the early 1970s.
   • 2005, Vince Gilligan, “Pilot”, in Breaking Bad (script):

     This is one of those 60s Googie-style structures—faded space-age futuristic. Young Mexicans dry the cars by hand.

   • 2012, Jenny Jones, The Big Lebowski, Voyageur Press, →ISBN, page 69:

     Its West Coast culture was open to bucking tradition, which fed into the sudden popularity of the Googie style. With its bold and ultramodern diagonal lines, bright signs, boomerangs, and cantilevered extensions, Googie was the look of the future.

   • 2023 December 14, Pearse Anderson, “‘Lonely, gray and being actively colonized by corporations’: we tried the McDonald’s spinoff, CosMc’s”, in The Guardian‎^[1], →ISSN:

     Thirty miles north of CosMc’s, the McDonald’s No 1 Store Museum once stood, a replica of the company’s stunning post-war sci fi Googie architecture that CosMc’s’ retro-details barely hold a candle to.

Further reading

• Googie architecture on Wikipedia.Wikipedia