![]() LOUISE KELLY: Tomorrowland, promise of things to come. (SOUNDBITE OF WALT DISNEY TV SHOW, "TOMORROWLAND") Westwick says aerospace engineers infiltrated nearly every aspect of California culture, from design to entertainment. ULABY: Those boogie boards you see at every beach? Invented from a material made to blow heat from rocket nozzles. And eventually, a $15 billion global industry with its own fashion, language and music.īEACH BOYS: (Singing) If everybody had an ocean across. ULABY: And what used to mean hauling around a hundred pounds of redwood became something nearly anyone could do. P: These new lightweight foams - polyurethane foam, polystyrene, Fiberglas, polyester resin - and then started building surfboards out of them. That's partly because the materials they created for flight were so easily adapted for things like surfing. He studies the aerospace industry, and says its engineers influenced design and architecture. ULABY: Peter Westwick is a Southern California history professor. P: There was this - very much this kind of Space Age, this "Jetsons" aesthetic in architecture, in design, Googie architecture of the '50s and '60s. (SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "AUSTIN POWERS: INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY") Evil's getaway vehicle in the first "Austin Powers" movie. ULABY: These restaurants looked so much like spacecraft, one even turned into Dr. But then what it is, is just a restaurant. It looks like some sort of an alien creature is inside this place. It looks like it's about ready to lift off. The building was intended to look like that. ![]() LOUISE KELLY: It almost looks like a flying saucer. Newlove pulls out blueprints for a coffee shop called Biff's. ULABY: Imagine a '59 Cadillac's swooping lines and rockety style. I mean, you know, everything had wings or fins. LOUISE KELLY: Our buildings sort of looked like the cars of the period, in some respects. His firm built dozens of restaurants across Southern California, in a style called Googie - that's a real architectural term, Googie. He's an architect who helped design Pann's. LOUISE KELLY: This is really bad for you - you know that. Pann's is also a culinary landmark, with terrific fried chicken. And they share the same far-out aesthetic: bold, boomerang angles undulating, amoeba-like shapes and floating starbursts. ULABY: They're from the same era - late '50s, early '60s. NEDA ULABY: Not far from the flamboyantly futuristic Los Angeles Airport, is a coffee shop called Pann's. LOUISE KELLY: Now with the space shuttle flying for the very last time, NPR's Neda Ulaby takes us to some landmarks of Space Age design and architecture. Unidentified Group (Singing) Meet George Jetson.
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