Tacoma Googie

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About Tacoma Googie

Retro buildings and signage are fast disappearing across America. This group is dedicated to documenting a retro style best described as Googie.

In our own area the Java Jive and the Seattle Space Needle come to mind as well known examples.

Posts to the group should be limited to signs, billboards and buildings in the greater Tacoma area. It would be very helpful if users would geo tag or post the location of the photo. NO PEOPLE PLEASE. Those images will be removed from the group.

According to Wikipedia:
Googie architecture (also known as populuxe or doo-wop) is a form of novelty architecture and a subdivision of futurist architecture, influenced by car culture and the Space Age and Atomic Age.[1] The style is related to and sometimes synonymous with the Raygun Gothic style as coined by writer William Gibson.

Originating in Southern California in the late 1940s and continuing approximately into the mid-1960s, the types of buildings that were most frequently designed in a Googie style were motels, coffee houses and bowling alleys. The academic vein of the school became widely-known as the Mid-Century modern movement, and some of those more notable variations reflect elements of the populuxe asthetic, as in Saarinen's TWA Flight Center.

Features of Googie include upswept roofs, curvaceous, geometric shapes, and bold use of glass, steel and neon. Googie was also characterized by space-age designs that depict motion, such as boomerangs, flying saucers, atoms and parabolas, and free-form designs such as "soft" parallelograms and the ubiquitous artist's-palette motif. These stylistic conventions reflected American society's emphasis on futuristic designs and fascination with Space Age themes. As with the art deco style of the 1930s, Googie became undervalued as time passed, and many buildings built in this style have been destroyed.