In 1949, architect John Lautner designed a coffee shop in West Hollywood that looked like it might blast off to Mars at any moment. Which, given the quality of coffee in 1949, was probably the building’s way of saying “I’m outta here—there’s got to be better espresso somewhere in the galaxy.”
The building featured a triangular roof soaring skyward at impossible angles, supported by what appeared to be a single steel toothpick.
(A very confident steel toothpick, mind you—the kind that never doubted its structural integrity even when gravity was placing very serious bets on catastrophic collapse.)
This was Googies. And it accidentally solved the greatest marketing puzzle of the automobile age: how do you make a driver traveling at highway speeds slam on their brakes and think, “What in the name of geometric impossibility is THAT supposed to be?”
The great highway attention heist
Picture America in the 1950s—one giant concrete ribbon connecting diners, drive-ins, and the occasional tornado, with cars hurtling along like caffeinated beetles racing toward their next sugar fix.
The interstate highway system had transformed how people moved, which meant businesses suddenly faced a terrifying new challenge: catching the attention of drivers rocketing past at 60 miles per hour while simultaneously wrestling with steering wheels the size of wagon wheels, arguing about whether they’d missed the turnoff to Poughkeepsie, and preventing the children in the backseat from achieving new levels of automotive chaos that would make actual chaos jealous.
Traditional signage was useless. It was like trying to flag down a hummingbird with a Post-it note, or explaining quantum physics to someone while they’re being chased by a very determined goose. The message simply couldn’t penetrate the velocity barrier.
So the building itself had to become the advertisement. The entire structure needed to leap up from the landscape and wave its architectural arms like an enthusiastic geometric cheerleader having an existential crisis.
The neuroscience of “holy moly, what’s THAT thing?”
Now here’s where it gets fascinating (and by fascinating, I mean “reveals something profound about human brains that somehow involves triangular coffee dispensaries”).
Googie architects stumbled onto something fundamental about attention that would make modern neuroscientists nod approvingly while spilling their lattes: we notice things that violently break patterns.
The human brain is essentially a very sophisticated anomaly detector—evolution’s way of making sure we spot the tiger hiding behind the supposedly familiar tree. Except in 1950s America, this ancient survival mechanism got repurposed to help us spot the perfect place to stop for pie and coffee while traveling at speeds that would have made our great-grandparents faint dead away.
Your prehistoric brain, designed to notice “that bush looks different today, perhaps it contains something with teeth,” suddenly found itself tasked with “that building looks like it’s been designed by aliens who’ve only heard coffee shops described through interpretive dance.”
And it worked brilliantly.
Three buildings that stopped traffic (literally)
The pioneer
Googies itself was architectural proof that sometimes the best marketing strategy is to look completely bonkers. One dramatic roof line that screamed “WE ARE NOT LIKE OTHER COFFEE SHOPS” to every motorist within a five-mile radius, without requiring a single focus group or brand consultant to explain why authenticity requires seventeen syllables and a paradigm shift.
The showstopper
Encounter Restaurant at LAX, completed in 1961. Picture this: a flying saucer perched on concrete spider legs, rotating slowly like a disco ball’s architecturally ambitious cousin who’d been hitting the geometry textbooks a bit too hard.
It was impossible to ignore—which is exactly what you want when you’re trying to catch the attention of people hurtling past in metal boxes at terrifying speeds. The building didn’t just house a restaurant; it WAS a giant neon sign that happened to serve food, a landmark that made every passing driver think, “Well, I wasn’t planning to stop, but now I absolutely must investigate this architectural fever dream.”
The speed demon’s delight
Pann’s Restaurant in Los Angeles, designed by Helen Liu Fong in 1958. Its jagged roofline and walls of glass made it look like a geometric jazz composition having an argument with gravity—and winning spectacularly.
The building announced its presence to highway traffic like a visual air horn, creating what can only be described as “architectural rubbernecking.” People would slow down just to make sure their eyes weren’t playing tricks on them, because surely normal buildings don’t look like they’ve been folded by origami masters with access to industrial materials and a complete disregard for conventional geometry.
The magnificent physics of highway hypnosis
Here’s the thing about driving at speed: it creates a weird psychological state where your brain goes into autopilot mode, like a very bored computer running a “drive forward, avoid things” program while the conscious mind wanders off to think about grocery lists and whether that thing your colleague said yesterday was actually passive-aggressive or just regular aggressive.
Highway hypnosis, they call it. Your eyes see the road, but your brain is basically window-shopping in its own thoughts.
Googie architecture was specifically designed to break this trance. It was visual smelling salts for the highway-hypnotized brain—sharp angles that sliced through mental fog like geometric lightning, impossible shapes that made your autopilot brain slam on the brakes and holler, “HEY! CONSCIOUS MIND! GET BACK HERE! WE’VE GOT A SITUATION!”
The buildings were engineered to create what we might call “beneficial rubbernecking”—the good kind of distraction that makes you slow down, not because there’s been an accident, but because someone has built something so magnificently weird that it demands investigation.
The three principles of highway magnetism
Velocity visibility
At 60 miles per hour, you have roughly 2.3 seconds to notice, process, and react to anything. Googie architects designed for this constraint—massive shapes, bold angles, impossible silhouettes that could penetrate highway tunnel vision faster than a caffeinated squirrel spotting an unguarded bird feeder.
Pattern disruption
Against the visual monotony of highway landscapes—gas stations, billboards, more gas stations, the occasional cow—Googie buildings stood out like architectural exclamation points. They weren’t just different; they were aggressively, magnificently, purposefully different in ways that made the pattern-detecting parts of your brain sit up and pay attention.
Gravitational curiosity
The best Googie buildings created what can only be described as “curiosity gravity”—an irresistible pull that made drivers think, “I wasn’t planning to stop, but I absolutely must investigate whatever’s happening in that building that appears to be defying several laws of physics.”
The lesson from the highway
The atomic age that inspired Googie architecture eventually faded, though we’re still dealing with its legacy of thinking that everything in the future would be sleek, space-age, and probably involve a lot more chrome than actually turned out to be practical.
Most of those magnificent highway attention-grabbers have been demolished, replaced by buildings that wouldn’t stop traffic if they were literally on fire.
(Which is a shame, because the world needs more architecture that makes people involuntarily slow down just to make sure their eyes are working properly.)
But the lesson endures: in a world of speed and distraction, sometimes the best way to capture attention is to build something so magnificently, purposefully weird that it creates its own traffic pattern.
What would your business look like if it had to stop a car traveling at highway speeds? If it had to penetrate the glazed-over consciousness of someone whose brain is running on cruise control?
Because here’s the thing about attention: it’s not politely distributed to whoever asks nicest. It’s seized by whoever’s brave enough to build something that makes people think, “Wait, what? Did I just see what I think I saw? I should probably turn around and investigate this architectural fever dream.”
Most businesses today are terrified of being that weird. Googie architects understood that being ignored by someone traveling at 60 miles per hour is the only real risk—and that sometimes, the best marketing strategy is to build something that looks like it could achieve orbital velocity while serving excellent pie.
This article was written with the assistance of AI.
