Before I moved to Los Angeles (almost 2 years ago now) I had never heard the word Googie. In fact, when a friend — a native Californian — used the term I initially thought it must have something to do ...

The car-centric architectural style, characterized by neon signs and dramatic rooflines, is now endangered. Its admirers mourn the loss of the ideals it represented. The car-centric architectural ...

The quickest way to sicken a modernist is to bring him to a midcentury Los Angeles diner. It isn't the food that will nauseate him. It's the architecture. Googie is the name for it, coined by the ...

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... In his eggplant-purple Miata convertible, sporting white-framed Italia sunglasses, Erick Roorda cruises South Broadway, seeking the dead among the living. He ...

It was the 1950s. America was a superpower, and the Los Angeles area was the center of it. The space race was on. A car culture was emerging. So were millions of postwar babies. Businesses needed ways ...

Los Angeles has certainly changed over the decades, as all thrumming and humming megalopolises tend to do, but it has never fully lost its architectural adherence to a certain midcentury moxie. Stream ...

This story is free to read because readers choose to support LAist. If you find value in independent local reporting, make a donation to power our newsroom today. Fans of mid-century architecture are ...

This story is free to read because readers choose to support LAist. If you find value in independent local reporting, make a donation to power our newsroom today. How to explain our love for Googie ...

Call it what you like: Populuxe, Doo-Wop, Coffee Shop Modern, Jet Age, Space Age. The mid-century Southern California architectural style, with its ski-jump roofs, starbursts and kidney-shaped signs, ...

It was the 1950s. America was a superpower, and the Los Angeles area was the center of it. The space race was on. A car culture was emerging. So were millions of postwar babies. Businesses needed ways ...