Googie Chrome

In Los Angeles, it’s still possible to visit some of the best postwar coffee shops in their vintage glory. The loud signs of Norms, Pann’s, and Bob’s Big Boy still rise above the city’s sprawl, attracting hungry motorists with their cheerful colors and neon lettering. Their flamboyant cantilevers and upswept roofs land somewhere between the Flintstones and the Jetsons—neither stone nor space age, but the Benzedrine zaniness of Truman-era America. The most iconic restaurant of this cohort, Googie’s Coffee Shop on the Sunset Strip, was demolished in 1988. The building, designed by John Lautner and completed in 1949, looked inconspicuous enough in its time—if not for the fact that a quarter of the restaurant shot up the wall of the neighboring pharmacy as if preparing to launch into the sky.

Donning the satirical persona of one Professor Thrugg in a 1952 article of House & Home, the New York architectural critic Douglas Haskell understood this particular restaurant as exemplary of a folly afflicting Southern Californian design. “You underestimate the seriousness of Googie,” mocked Haskell. “After all, they are working in Hollywood, and Hollywood has let them know what it expects of them.” (The article appeared next to an ambivalent spread of Lautner’s Hollywood homes. “Can this, or can it not, be,” asked House & Home’s editors, “the future of serious architecture?”) With bold uses of mixed materials, large concrete slabs could rest on simple steel frames in gravity-defying postures. Ever-larger panes of glass created continuous lines between interior and exterior space; restaurants were turned inside out, as if to meet customers in their cars. And when In-N-Out founder Harry Snyder introduced a two-way speaker to his San Gabriel Valley burger chain in 1948, it meant that patrons could simply drive through the restaurant, dissolving the last barriers between vehicle and consumption. Flashy geometric construction not only caught the eye at zooming speeds, it also came to form the basis for chain brand language—both Norms’ darts and McDonald’s arches, for example, began as roadside gimmicks before being incorporated into logos. Googie was midcentury modern design for the masses, growing equally out of Southern California’s burgeoning car culture and aerospace industry, by far the largest employer in the region at the time. When customers visited the Tiny Naylor’s on the corner of La Brea and Sunset for carhop service, they parked under the extended wings of a concrete aircraft. Elsewhere, Googie’s ubiquitous boomerang motif schematized the era’s aerodynamic aspirations; atomic explosions were transmuted into starbursts.

Googie exuded a peculiar optimism that portrayed nuclear power not as a doomsday weapon but as a source of the energy abundance that was to fuel unlimited American growth. Today, Tesla is selling solar as a way to recuperate this vision, and in July, the company opened its own neo-Googie Tesla Diner on Santa Monica Boulevard, giving Los Angeles a slice of Muskian techno-utopia. With eighty Supercharger stalls, the new eatery acts as a filling station for both electric vehicles and their owners. According to Tesla’s website, solar-powered charging canopies will reduce the lot’s carbon emissions by approximately 26.6 million pounds of CO₂ per year. As if tallow-fried spuds and organic milkshakes weren’t enough of a sop to his fan boys, Elon Musk promised that Tesla’s “general-purpose” humanoid robot, Optimus Gen 2, would provide car-side food service.

The only computer intelligence I encountered on a visit in early August, however, was a self-order kiosk tablet. Although Optimus had served popcorn to guests on opening day, the bot and its kin were now caged in vitrines along the stairwell. “By continually optimizing its proportions, reliability and operational consistency, we are able to make each generation of Optimus far more capable than its predecessor,” reads a diorama label. Decidedly less optimized was the restaurant’s layout. Upon arrival, patrons are funneled into a line outside, then directed toward ordering kiosks by one attendant and handed receipt tickets by another. Drinks and food are received in succession down a long dining counter, creating awkward bottlenecks that a text message notification system does little to relieve. Rather than intuitively pulling visitors forward, curved white walls and long strips of glowing light disorient customers in an austere high-tech atmosphere almost as soulless as a hospital corridor. In subtle, matte wall text, Tesla’s mission declares itself above diner’s heads: “Accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”

In true Googie style, the Tesla Diner logo is inspired by the building shape itself—a saucer-like design with a bulging midsection and small crow’s nest structure above that makes space for a rooftop patio much larger than the dining room inside. Tulip-stemmed furniture and podlike booths contribute to a midcentury feeling, and two giant drive-in movie screens conjure hopes of reaching second base tonight, but the general effect is impersonal and cold. Where pictures of celebrities enjoying their favorite house dishes adorn just about every classic diner or coffee shop in Los Angeles, the walls here are sparse. Retro T-shirts emblazoned with Cybertrucks blatantly copy In-N-Out merch, and the drive-in screens, which only play a full movie once a day, completely obstruct the windows of neighboring buildings. (On my visit the diner was playing a clip from—who could have guessed—the Iron Man franchise.) Adopting a more exaggerated UFO form would have been in line with Googie spirit—in the vein of Lautner’s Chemosphere (1960) or Paul R. Williams’s LAX Theme Building (1961)—but this self-serious derivative mostly just draws attention to its technological shortcomings. The restaurant’s reflective steel siding, for instance, comes off not as a kitschy use of an innovative material but as plainly cheap. And for those wondering: The grub offers none of the sinful satisfaction that diner food should, and the modern updates, such as the Cali Breakfast Tacos and Iced Matcha Latte, don’t rise up to the local standard. (Slapping an avocado on a dish does not automatically make it Californian.)

The location of the Tesla Diner at Santa Monica and North Orange Drive, on the western end of Route 66, was clearly meant to evoke roadside greasy spoons of yore. What’s fitting, considering Musk’s efforts to undermine mass transit, is that it was also once the site of a light rail station. Constructed in 1896, the South Hollywood–Sherman Line ran for nearly sixty years, connecting the streetcar suburb of Sherman (now West Hollywood) to downtown Los Angeles and as far west as Venice. The line, an important link on Pacific Electric Railway’s famed Red Car system, was part of the largest electric rail network in the world at the time. But the project was hardly utopian: The robber barons Henry Huntington and Isaias W. Hellman developed Pacific Electric as a monopoly to benefit their real estate investments across the greater Los Angeles region, much of which had only recently been made inhabitable by William Mulholland’s Owens Valley aqueduct. Increasingly mismanaged, unreliable, and unpopular, private streetcars were ultimately put out of business by Eisenhower’s freeway system. The South Hollywood–Sherman Line terminated passenger service in 1953, a year after Haskell published his Googie satire.

Inasmuch as Googie is still seen as futuristic, it represents a particular expression of futuristic thinking—a postwar vision of immense national prosperity in which the height of personal achievement is signaled through suburban home and car ownership. It makes sense that Tesla should appropriate this periodized aesthetic; after all, it’s an automative company with express interest in preserving American dependence on cars. This retrofuturism falls flat not so much because Americans are suddenly interested in weaning their automobile addiction but because the contours of US society and economy are wildly different than what they were in the 1950s. Tesla’s promise feels especially hollow this year, as it’s fallen to second place in the global EV sales race, surpassed for the first time by Chinese manufacturer BYD in part because of Musk’s involvement in Trump’s isolationist economy.

Owning a car will always, no matter how optimized, be more environmentally harmful than taking mass transit. The Tesla Diner tries to dissimulate this simple fact through its flying saucer design, which minimizes the building’s contact with the ground in order to expand surface-level parking. (Tesla drivers—and Tesla drivers only—can order food to eat in the lot after hours.) As Thomas de Monchaux wrote in New York Review of Architecture #42, “Space-age retrofuturist architectures are at great energetic and material cost made to look like they rest so very lightly and harmlessly on the earth—part of blameless nature and not complicit culture.” Stantec, the architectural multinational Tesla hired to realize the project, takes this green capitalism to an extreme, providing consulting for hydrology, mining, and city planning projects, in addition to this present venture into American fast casual. Surveying Stantec’s recent work—from a wastewater treatment plant in Alberta to a gold mine in Peru, from a bridge replacement in Kentucky to an updated city plan for Sugar Land, Texas—one gets the sense that the rather anonymous firm is performing neither horizontal nor vertical integration but is simply collapsing “the environment” under its “expertise” altogether.

Along with Tesla’s appropriation of the classic pickup truck, the Tesla Diner attempts to convince consumers that making the EV switch can be as American as apple pie. In fact, as Musk has suggested, this diner on Route 66 may become the first of many at Supercharger stations, nourishing a new sort of Great American Road Trip, perhaps. The idea should not be entirely dismissed, especially in California, where (if current regulations remain) all new passenger cars must be zero-emission by 2035. But it also feels like small consolation in a state where high-speed rail suffers never-ending delays and billions of dollars in federal funding cuts this year alone. As it happens, Los Angeles’s golden age of rail was partly led by a man who had much more in common with Elon Musk than any state legislator today. Antique booster maps of Southern California still sit in the archives of the Huntington Library, showing a land of endless sun and prosperity ready to be partitioned and settled. Ironically, it was the Red Cars that first contributed to city’s pattern of suburban sprawl, pushing Pacific Electric’s already faltering capacity to the breaking point. If Tesla can learn one lesson from this, it’s that a successful transportation network must be honest about the problems it is trying to solve. As it stands now, Tesla is neither accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy nor offering a convincing vision of the country’s future—let alone its past.