Watch the video and complete the gaps:
Music playing]
Charles: I am
to the mid-century American culture because it
classic and
at the same time.
John: Los Angeles was the
place to reinvent oneself. Nowhere is that more true in a way and the way in which people adapted to the car culture of Southern California.
Charles: The custom car culture was the
garde of the car culture.
Billy: After World War II, we have a lot of kids around and they get these old cast-off cars and
rod them up.
Troy copy, George Perez, you know, his contemporaries, they create a copy and they wanted to make cars that look like they were
cars in Southern California.
was invented here in Southern California and, y'know, it's like: "What can we do? What can we do that's crazier?"
Charles: California crazy architecture, you know, you j'st find it a lot around the country, but it was really
here with the big donuts and the gas station that look like airplanes. I think LA became the place of crazy architecture because of the movie industry. Creative people were here.
John: So, here we are at
Astro Coffee Shop in
Silver Lake that was built in 1958 and designed by the great
coffeeshop architects. I'm gonna point some little things about Googie architecture, some of the points of the style here. Here at Astro’s you can see this incredible classic Armet & Davis style
roofline that floats out over the street, a giant iconic form that can be seen from way down the street to attract passing motorists. We had to bring people in, day and night and the building works both day and night as a
for hungry travelers. They are quintessentially Los Angeles buildings, and as you can see, they also remind people of the
Jetsons, of course. In fact, some people could say this is Jetsons’ architecture.
Billy: Los Angeles is the epicenter of kitsch. You think of kitsch a lot of time as being kind of
and campy.
Charles: This is a colorful and
, I love that 'bout it, of course, and you can laugh at it, have fun 'cause it's
, and it's like.. arty. It was the golden era of our culture, I think, our American culture.