The Revenge of Googie

Anna Kodé has a piece in the New York Times (gift article) about the early Space Age Googie style of architecture. The article is filled with eye candy and visual delights from the style, some prominent artifacts of which were still around when I was young. It brings a tremendous sense of nostalgia.

Kodé examines why people now seems so attracted to buildings that were, just a few decades ago, disparaged as being garish.

The sense of excitement for tomorrow that fueled Googie is hard to find in general these days. If anything, today’s mainstream culture wants to go back in time, not forward. Consider the surge in vinyl record player sales, the endless stream of film remakes or the slogan that won the election, “Make America Great Again.” Even the contemporary obsession with Googie could be viewed as part of this nostalgia boom.

Now, there’s a pervasive sense of despair, rather than hope, about technology’s ability to solve our problems. Social media was supposed to make us feel connected, but in fact we feel lonelier. Artificial intelligence was supposed to make our jobs easier, but it’s put them at risk. We’ve lost faith in the future, and Googie represents a time when we still had it.

I believe Kodé touches on something that now is an almost universal feeling: that we have been let down by technology. Some of us grew up with this great sense of optimism about where technology would take us. We would be living in space, perhaps getting around in flying cars, like The Jetsons. Computers would not only be advanced and ubiquitous labor saving devices, they would also allow us to indulge our creativity, curiosity and capabilities like never before. We were promised jet packs, as they say. 

To be fair, technology is vastly expanding our horizons. In that way, it is fulfilling its promise. It’s just that we now know that achieving utopia is more than a matter of making a better widget.