Word: coolhaus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Owned and run by L.A. natives Natasha Case and Freya Estreller, Coolhaus debuted at the Coachella music festival near Palm Springs in April, with an initial investment of $15,000. That first weekend, the business broke even. By June, it was operating in the black. "It's very profitable," says Case, who received her master's degree in architecture from UCLA last year. "It's almost better than architecture." (Read TIME'S 1981 cover story on ice cream...
Since its launch, the truck has been in high demand. Coolhaus has more than 4,300 followers on Twitter, where they are kept up to date on the truck's whereabouts. It has been profiled in food and design media alike and recently fielded a call from someone at Gehry's office, wondering when the truck would be making its way to that neck of L.A.'s suburban sprawl. And in a town where none other than Brad Pitt has made distinctive architecture as necessary as a personal trainer (Pitt interned at Gehry's office in 2004), the truck...
...second-year graduate student at SCI-Arc, L.A.'s avant-garde architectural academy (and a friend of Case's from their undergraduate days at UC Berkeley), is working on the truck several days a week for the summer. In her time on the project, she has come to view Coolhaus less as an ice cream truck and more as an architectural installation. "The truck arrives at a destination, and it creates a whole new atmosphere," she explains. "We'll show up in a parking lot, and that leads to a gathering of people in a parking lot - a place they...
Ultimately, however, a truck's success rests on the quality of its product. At Coolhaus, artisanal ice cream from L.A.'s gourmet comfort-food outpost Milk is pressed between soft, fresh-baked cookies and sold under a variety of architectural names - from Tea-dao Ando (a green-tea ice cream in honor of the Japanese architect who built the Pulitzer museum in St. Louis, Mo.) to Orange Julius Shulman (a blood-orange sorbet named after the famed architectural photographer). The sandwiches are traditional in appearance, though in their structure they blend the bold horizontal lines of Koolhaas' Seattle library with...
...work developing their next architecturally inspired food project: perhaps an experimental supper club or even a line of Popsicles made to resemble famous buildings. "The name of our umbrella company is Farchitecture," says Estreller, who didn't study architecture but currently works in low-income housing development. "Coolhaus is just one of our projects. There will definitely be other projects." Future Frank Lloyd Wrights may want to take note: perhaps you should study food service instead...