Fort Collins is kind of uncool.
I don’t mean like bitter, mean, no fun uncool. I mean like we don’t have any cool googie architecture –that 50s/60s atomic boomerang look. We have a little bit, and we used to have a little bit more:
Butterfly roofline on old dairy building, LaPorte and Meldrum.
Michael's Drive through, with zig zag roof
But we don’t have any googie in all the places you would expect to find it–bowling alleys, old diners and motels. Okay, you might consider the old Safeway with its Marina roof googie.
I’m going to keep looking.
Meanwhile, you know what mid-century architecture we do have a lot of? MANSARD!!!!! So, my next post is going to have to be about Mansard roofs in Fort Collins. You revile them now, we all do. But someday you’ll love them. Just wait.
Have you ever read “Populuxe” by Thomas Hine? It’s a great read about the “googie” era of architecture and design. You’d love it!
Wow, I walked by that building on a nearly daily basis, on LaPorte, and never thought of it as part of a particular style. Look for some buildings on East Central in Albuquerque or anywhere in Socorro, NM. It seems that anything old here is nuclear age, Spanish colonial, or really, really old.