Word: architecturee
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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And indeed, Langdon and Hess make reasonable cases that fast-food restaurant design is the snappiest, purest expression of the American Zeitgeist at mid-century: architecture as billboard advertising, billboard advertising as architecture. Both authors note that the germs of the modern strip were the work of serious architects, not...
The species was invented in the 1920s, when the automobile turned from novelty to necessity and White Castle sold its first tiny square hamburgers from its tiny squarish outlets. After World War II, the genealogy divided into two distinct branches. In the downtownish precincts of Southern California were the new...
In the 1960s, when the space-age future finally arrived, futuristic imagery was abandoned. Drive-ins died out, and fast-food restaurants became larger, more middle class. The new buildings were low slung, brownish, plastered with brick veneer. The exuberance of the late '40s and '50s architecture was replaced by...
But the golden age of golden-arch architecture has a legacy nevertheless. California's Frank Gehry, for instance, practices a scrupulously conceived kind of rawboned Googie architecture: his buildings are striking mixes of forms, structural systems and materials, and sometimes (as in the Aerospace Museum in Los Angeles) they even...
Fast-food architecture is coming full circle too. Two years ago, outside Chicago, the deconstructionist New York firm SITE built a sublime McDonald's. The basic kit of pieces was standard, but SITE made the whole restaurant seem to hover: brick walls are cantilevered up off the ground, the roof...