Googie

Here we have a documentary that treats the preservation of mid-century commercial architecture with the reverence of a museum curator arranging Fabergé eggs. Jake Gorst's film celebrates Googie design as a noble cultural artifact worthy of conservation, which is admirable in its own right, though it arrives sufficiently late to the task that the buildings have already been demolished. The film features Alan Hess, a serious architectural historian, and other knowledgeable voices discussing the rise and eclipse of this American design movement.

The documentary approaches its subject matter as a straightforward historical and aesthetic chronicle. It does not interrogate the capitalist impulses that generated these spaces, nor does it pause to consider whose communities were displaced by postwar urban development or suburban expansion. The film celebrates preservation efforts, which is a conservative impulse dressed in the language of cultural awareness. It speaks to buildings, not to the people who once inhabited them or were priced out as these districts gentrified.

One observes the careful curation of voices here: architects, preservationists, and design historians. The casting of experts skews toward those with established credentials and established platforms. The film is a love letter to a moment when American commercial optimism could be expressed in swooping rooflines and neon, before anyone asked inconvenient questions about who was building these structures or who could afford to consume in them. It is a pleasant, erudite film about aesthetics without politics, which in 2026 reads as a deliberate choice to avoid any engagement with the social dimensions of the spaces it celebrates.