There was a time, unremembered by most Americans, when Burger King and Pizza Hut and Dunkin' Donuts did not dominate the nation's highways and boulevards. ! The proliferation of chain restaurants (60,000 at last count) is a signal social fact of the past four decades, a transformation of the commercial landscape more swift and radical than any other in U.S. history. Strung out along main drags in every city, fast-food franchises become the strip, identically chaotic collages of glowing signs and prefab construction. The helter-skelter of the strip is the urban critic's most convenient cliche --cheap-jack American laissez-faire run amuck.
For two decades, however, an avant-garde of populist architectural historians has been looking at the strip and its larger-than-life iconography without conventional middlebrow contempt. The movement's manifesto is Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Robert Venturi's examination of crowd-pleasing architectural symbolism and buildings designed primarily for drivers. The irony is so American, so pop: cultural highbrows celebrating unself-conscious lowbrow vulgarity.
Now, just as the 40-year emergence of the strip seems complete, a pair of books renews the scholarly pursuit. Philip Langdon's Orange Roofs, Golden Arches (Knopf; $30) is an exhaustive social history of chain restaurants. Googie: fifties coffee shop architecture (Chronicle Books; $12.95) is a more polemical and quirky work. Author Alan Hess, a California architect, takes as his nostalgic prototype a Sunset Boulevard snack shop built in 1949 and zigzags through a hot-rod-and-chili-dog architectural tour that celebrates old McDonald's outlets, car washes and Las Vegas casinos--all the pushy, flimsy '50s buildings that Hess calls "agitprop for the commercial future."
To orthodox historic preservationists, it seems perverse to make instant history out of the immediate past. But Hess is a militant. He belongs to the Society for Commercial Archeology and claims as his proudest achievement convincing the Department of the Interior in 1984 that the oldest surviving McDonald's, plopped down just 31 years earlier in suburban Los Angeles, deserves inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.
And indeed, Langdon and Hess make reasonable cases that fast-food restaurant design is the snappiest, purest expression of the American Zeitgeist at mid-century: architecture as billboard advertising, billboard advertising as architecture. Both authors note that the germs of the modern strip were the work of serious architects, not anonymous commercial draftsmen.