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The species was invented in the 1920s, when the automobile turned from novelty to necessity and White Castle sold its first tiny square hamburgers from its tiny squarish outlets. After World War II, the genealogy divided into two distinct branches. In the downtownish precincts of Southern California were the new coffee shops, like Googies, serving 24 hours a day, greasy spoons with super-duper production values and plenty of room. Meanwhile, out in the suburbs and on numberless freeways, the hamburger stand became pandemic. Hess calls Ships, a Googie imitator built in 1958 and demolished in 1984, "the major monument of Coffee Shop Modern," where "Fred Flintstone and George Jetson could meet over a cup of coffee." The descendants include Big Boy, Denny's and Sambo's. From 1950 to 1960, years of heedless American growth, cars multiplied and the great fast-food empires were born: McDonald's, Tastee Freez, Jack-in-the-Box, Burger King, Dunkin' Donuts, Mister Donut, Pizza Hut, Burger Chef. The architecture that resulted was a sort of Sunbelt peasant modernism, simple constructivist cartoons in steel and glass, designed to catch the attention at highway speeds. Usually, as Langdon says, it was a case of "form faking function." Cosmetic A-frames were slapped onto plain boxes; McDonald's golden arches never supported anything. The "modernism" of the fast-food stands was superficial set design, not unlike today's putatively "postmodern" shopping- mall facades.
In the 1960s, when the space-age future finally arrived, futuristic imagery was abandoned. Drive-ins died out, and fast-food restaurants became larger, more middle class. The new buildings were low slung, brownish, plastered with brick veneer. The exuberance of the late '40s and '50s architecture was replaced by bland pseudohomeyness in the '60s and '70s. Bad good taste supplanted good bad taste.
But the golden age of golden-arch architecture has a legacy nevertheless. California's Frank Gehry, for instance, practices a scrupulously conceived kind of rawboned Googie architecture: his buildings are striking mixes of forms, structural systems and materials, and sometimes (as in the Aerospace Museum in Los Angeles) they even play with illusions of antigravity.
Fast-food architecture is coming full circle too. Two years ago, outside Chicago, the deconstructionist New York firm SITE built a sublime McDonald's. The basic kit of pieces was standard, but SITE made the whole restaurant seem to hover: brick walls are cantilevered up off the ground, the roof floats above the walls. Decadent, maybe, but delightful too. In heartland suburbia, the highest of high camp has thus been achieved. When kitsch icons like McDonald's come with their own built-in ironic critique, an epoch must be at an end.