What’s Happening: Though many Googie structures have fallen into disrepair or met the wrecking ball, the Space Age style rings nostalgic for many and has been preserved by a wave of restaurateurs who’ve restored former roadside fast food joints in California.

The Download: Midcentury modern often comes to mind when thinking of the architecture of Southern California, with the low-slung indoor-outdoor villas of Palm Springs and Julius Shulman’s iconic photographs of the glass-walled Stahl House hovering over a twinkling L.A. embedded in our consciousness. But there’s no architectural movement more inextricably linked to the region than Googie, the wildly expressive style whose upswept roofs, ostentatious colors, and parabolic shapes captured a Space Age optimism. Land in LAX and you immediately see the mysterious Theme Building; drive around to find car washes, diners, and even the oldest McDonald’s restaurant still kicking between two giant golden arches in nearby Downey.

A recent movement has swept the city to breathe new life into the “architectural ghosts of fast-food past”—many of them in structures influenced by Googie. Wienerschnitzel recently vacated one of its signature A-frame structures in Rosemead, with locals fearing the ‘60s-era hallmark would meet the wrecking ball. Instead, the 432-square-foot space was easily converted into a Bành Mì takeout joint. (A similar Wienerschnitzel shell became a Brazilian Plate House in Torrance.) Tierra Mia Coffee repurposed a now-closed KFC’s iconic roadside logo into a giant mug by affixing a small handle to the bucket. Meanwhile, a Googie-inspired KFC in Koreatown, designed by Frank Gehry protégé Jeffrey Daniels, is still standing strong despite long being misunderstood and named one of the city’s ugliest buildings.

The term “Googie” was first coined by editor Douglas Haskell in a scathing review of the flourishing postwar style after driving by Googie’s Diner, a West Hollywood coffee shop designed by John Lautner in 1949. A staunch Modernist, Haskell maligned the style’s perceived lack of seriousness as a consequence of the tackiness of Hollywood, which he posited was fueling its popularity. It wasn’t so much the movies as California’s thriving car culture, which saw motorists speed by their surroundings on freshly paved highways. It was critical that roadside businesses stand out, and outlandish architecture that teased the imagination was the way to do it.

The name stuck; the distaste didn’t. Googie buildings were surging in popularity and popped up all across Southern California in midcentury, a phenomenon that architectural historian Alan Hess attributes to the style’s humble origins and unpretentious aesthetic that appealed to the middle class. “One of the key things about Googie architecture was that it wasn’t custom houses for wealthy people,” he told Smithsonian. “It was for coffee shops, gas stations, car washes, banks, the average buildings of everyday life that people of that period used and lived in. And it brought that spirit of the modern age to their daily lives.”

Googie eventually fell victim to changing tastes, giving way to more muted architectural forms and the ecology movement that popular culture started favoring in the ‘70s. (McDonald’s, for example, changed its building prototype from Googie to brick walls and mansard roofs in the late ’60s.) Many Googie buildings closed decades ago, with a 1986 Los Angeles Times article noting “much of this architectural genre … is slowly succumbing to remodeling or has been relegated to the Googie graveyard.”

Despite the downturn, preservationists have been fighting to save Googie hallmarks since the mid-’80s, when Hess published Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture. Many of these buildings, which developers didn’t think were worth preserving as cultural artifacts, have since received historic designations thanks to efforts by the Los Angeles Conservancy Modern Committee.

In Their Own Words: “[Googie] didn’t only capture the future, but it brought it in a meaningful way to people,” Hess says. “And you see this in interest in these futuristic ideas not only in architecture or car design, but in cartoons like The Jetsons and places like amusement parks—in advertisements, in magazines, and so forth, certainly in the movies as well. This interest, this intrigue, this appeal of living in the future just went all across the culture.”

Surface Says: Feeling nostalgic for the style? We don’t blame you—it also informed the settings of TV series like Futurama and The Powerpuff Girls, and explains why Disney’s futuristic Tomorrowland feels magical to this day.

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Do you prefer Nutella or Cadbury flakes on your dick waffle? Dick dessert summer isn’t the summer we asked for, but maybe it’s the one we deserve. The catalyst behind this season’s hottest treat trend is hard to grasp, but this much is clear: people are going ham over pecker pastries. In New York, Kinky’s Dessert Bar is turning out waffles in two shapes—Dicky or Va-JayJay—with flavor options such as Slutty Cinnamon and Forbidden Fruit. (They also hawk X-rated cupcakes whose realistic design is NSFW.) While at Sugar Wood, in SoHo, queer celebrity baker Tom Smallwood of Magnolia Bakery offers Woody and Kitty waffles either naked or dripped with sauces like peanut butter and salted caramel. Part of the proceeds are donated to the Phluid Project, which supports LGBTQIA+ communities.

Mr. Dick’s in Manchester, England, dips its phalluses and vulvas in dark, pink, or gold chocolate, and sprinkles them with crushed Oreos, Lotus Biscoff, and other toppings. Canada, too, is hopping on the dick waffle train. Toronto’s Members Only Waffle House drenches its disco sticks, called Members, in luxurious Belgian chocolate. Lil Willy’s, in Vancouver, peddles flavors like BBC (big black chocolate) and Wet Dream (vanilla). Then there’s Zizi Pop Montreal, which loads its johnsons with elevated ingredients such as bbq bacon or Japanese mayo and teriyaki puffed rice. Truth be told, a few scrolls through social media and it becomes easy to see why these crass confectioners are popping up around the globe: they want to go venereal, er, viral.

For the 56th installment of Design Dialogues, Surface CEO Marc Lotenberg joined architect Winka Dubbeldam and designer Dror Benshetrit in conversation about environmentally conscious design at tile and stone purveyor Arca’s showroom in Wynwood, Miami. An overarching theme of the talk was defining sustainability in architecture, and the specific ecological initiatives each panelist is taking in their practices.

“The best thing we can do is build nothing,” said Dubbeldam, who also chairs the architecture department at the University of Pennsylvania. “But as we all know, there is an appetite for development. We can do what we did for the Hangzhou Asian Games arena, a 116-acre eco-park in the city that acts like a sponge,” she says, referencing its ability to filter stormwater and retain it for reuse during dry periods. Each building within the park has minimal air conditioning, instead using water from restored wetlands on the site of the park to cool the structures. “What’s really important in sustainability is to reduce the amount of resources we use and to think of things that save energy,” she said of the approach at her firm, Archi-tectonics.

“Sustainability’ is a word we need to replace,” said Benshetrit. “We need to evolve from sustainability to ecological harmony.” For him, and his design and technology organization Supernature Labs, a key aspect of that evolution is the use of bio-planning as well as regenerative and biophilic design principles to stop the destruction of natural resources in the building process. “I feel that we’ve overused that word in the sense that we cannot just wash our hands and say, ‘We’ve done a little better than the ones who were here before us.’”

Film and television have always tried to predict the future. Transit is often a cornerstone of these visions—who can forget Blade Runner’s hovering Spinners or the chaotic airborne car chase scene in The Fifth Element? The dystopian series Westworld and Altered Carbon both depict a hyper-real future in which the wealthy get around in luxury drones. But as technology progresses and cities re-evaluate how to modernize transit systems for the post-pandemic era, how far off are these extreme advances in mobility and what will it look like?

There’s no clear answer, but city dwellers will soon have far more options than walking or driving as development on autonomous aerial vehicles (hoverbikes, self-driving taxis) and Hyperloops continues apace. “We see public transit’s role evolving to become mobility managers, orchestrating movement throughout their cities,” David Reich, Uber’s head of transit, tells McKinsey. “That includes more modes of transportation, such as dockless scooters, e-bikes, rideshare, and microtransit.”

Neal Aronowitz is a self-taught sculptor who finds inspiration in the natural world and the dynamic forms within it. After years of running Neal Aronowitz Stone & Tile, a successful stone and interiors business in New York City and Portland, he launched an art and design studio that focuses on hand-crafted bespoke furniture and lighting. The work of the studio continues with a passion for daring forms, material experimentation, and simple beauty.

Surface Says: Using an ultra-thin concrete fabric as his material of choice, Aronowitz sculpts statement furniture that evokes calligraphic brushstrokes—or perhaps a flying carpet. His pieces, especially the award-winning Whorl Console, appear to levitate gracefully and effortlessly, infusing airiness and emotion into a traditionally cold material.

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