Hickey describes the look as "somewhere between Hindu temples and launching pads."
The look, sometimes called Googie, after Lautner's design for the Googie's coffee shop in Los Angeles, predated the Sputnik launching and had influences back to Wayne McAllister's curvaceous hotels and drive-ins, to Frank Lloyd Wright and even to Futurism in the 1920s. It took off along with the space race and produced buildings that tried very hard to bring the Jetsons to life, like Lautner's 1960 Chemosphere, a saucer-shaped house that looks as if it is preparing to hover out over the Hollywood Hills.
Kenneth Frampton, the architectural historian, said it was often difficult to disentangle the threads of the space-age look, whose origins come from early airplane and jet design. Frampton added that the lines of influence that began with Fuller's geodesic domes and other futuristic ideas could be traced across the ocean to Archigram, the visionary group of British architects who proposed far-out projects (never realized) like capsule-shaped living pods and suits that could expand and double as structures.
Their spirit has, in turn, inspired and animated many contemporary high-tech architects like Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid and Renzo Piano, whose tubular, machinelike Pompidou Center, built with Richard Rogers, seems to evoke the space race in very specific ways.
"You could draw certain parallels between the structure of the Pompidou and the structure of the rocket-launching facilities at Cape Canaveral," said Frampton, who teaches at Columbia. "They might not have been thinking about it, but I think there is some kind of unconscious affinity there."
RSS