Editor’s note: This story first appeared in the December 9, 1968, issue of New York. It was also featured in Reread, New York’s subscriber-only archives newsletter. Click here to read the newsletter this appeared in.
This is a show, this set of pictures … of electro-graphic architecture from around Los Angeles and San Diego. Electrographic … I coined the term myself … Why be bashful! The existing vocabulary of art history is helpless before what commercial artists are now doing in the western USA. Commercial artists in America are now at least ten years ahead of serious artists in almost every field, including architecture … It’s a revelation, you might say … which first came to me one evening on Park Avenue, in New York. I stopped by the lobby of the Pepsi-Cola building to see a show of neon sculpture by Billy Apple. Apple is a serious artist. Avant-garde is the word. He “combines art and technology” … “He is a lyrical user of neon with a very personal sense of color,” in the words of Jack Burnham … The praise is running deep … I walk in and here is neon tubing hung from wires and bent into simple geometric shapes … The colors are curiously pallid, for neon … Everything is a sick apricot in here … They’re limp… They splutter… They’re like the neon outlines you can still see sometimes in the windows of the old bars with glass brick facing and other remains of 1930s Glamour … Frankly, I’m embarrassed for the guy! … All I can think of is that I could walk over a few blocks to almost any intersection along the avenues on the West Side or drive out Route 22 in New Jersey and see some common commercial electric signs that do it better … There’s not a drive-in or all-night cafeteria or bar & grill in the lot that doesn’t give the glories of electric tubing a better ride … A lyrical user of neon with a —
All of this came back to me last week as I drove around Los Angeles and San Diego. Here is an electric sign I saw on El Cajon Boulevard in San Diego, near the Route 395 freeway … By Melvin Zeitvogel of the California Neon Co. — why be bashful! … I wish I could show it in action … Each letter of BUICK is on a baroque rocket … The lights work in a series … In phase 2 the rockets light up orange and yellow … They shoot off red jet flames … They take off to the left … A terrific rush of light shoots up the main stem there, the big parabola … lt explodes in the crazed atomic nucleus at the top … The sign is 105 feet high, 11 stories up in the air, in other words … It’s insane! … It’s marvelous!
Melvin Zeitvogel did this sign ten years ago. Serious artists and architects are only just now approaching the ideas commercial artists like him have been working with for years … I notice in the October issue of Progressive Architecture that Kenneth Carbajal is saying: “What is happening in architecture today is a revolution. It is a complete readjustment of aesthetics that puts it more in step with the Space Age and its materials and forms.” … More statements about the revolution … They love this word revolution … They set about illustrating it. They present a special section on electric light experiments … The Pulsa group at Yale, in Project Argus … A California group designs “neon banners” for Charles Moore’s Faculty Club building at the University of California’s Santa Barbara campus … Here are designers working with Supergraphics, as they call it, for interiors … Everybody comes skipping and screaming into the million-volt future. Of course in another magazine, Domus … they’re excited about some simple rectangles of light used on the exterior and interior of a club in Rimini, Italy, called The Other World, and about some light show effects in the Piper-Pluriclub … I pick up a new book entitled Beyond Modern Sculpture. It calls light sculpture the new wave in this age of new technologies … They’re all in there, serious artists like Apple, Dan Flavin, Martial Raysse, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman … They have terrific theories, especially Rauschenberg and Whitman, about cybernetic art, computer art, holographic art, laser art. But I look at what they have actually done and then at Melvin Zeitvogel’s BUICK — it’s crazy! The art world is upside down. All of a sudden the avant-garde, the serious artists, are the primitives, the Grandma Moseses … The commercial artists, the Melvin Zeitvogels, are the classicists …
Melvin Zeitvogel! I have to call the guy up … He’s 54 years old, it turns out … He tells me he started out as a glass blower. He was hired by California Neon 25 years ago, when he was 29, because he could work with the glass that goes into neon and fluorescent tubing. He gradually moved into designing … He was 44 when he did BUICK … I asked him if most electric sign designers get into it indirectly like he did … No, he says, quite a few today have some art training … “You kind of need a fellow who has — you know … kind of an arty side to him” —
Kind of an arty side to him! Perfect. The notion that he himself is an artist — none of the great sign artists seem to lose any sleep over that … Which is their secret, of course. They’re free souls! The hell with art history and the New York art status sphere! The hell with Art Forum and the new academy! The hell with the Bauhaus, Mies, Corbu, Billy Apple and all lyrical users of neon with a very personal sense of color! — Yahhhh! — if anybody ever heard of them. Practically all the men in the new electro-graphic architecture have been engaged first of all in a highly competitive business … They have been building not to catch the eye of the art world but of people driving by in cars … It’s as simple as that … A very liberating thing, the car … Millions of Americans roaring down the strips and boulevards and strips and freeways in 327-horsepower family car dreamboat fantasy creations …
… Daddy Dreamboat Family Car …
Designing for the eyes of people moving — it shook California’s commercial artists and engineers free of the whole historic baggage of serious architects … who still think in terms of static solids … Zeitvogel’s BUICK is 1960-style Las Vegas electro-graphic architecture … He added an 11-story electric sign to a conventional one-story commercial building, the Dick Grahalva Buick agency … Since then Los Angeles commercial artists have unified the concept. They don’t just add the lighting. They combine lighting, graphics and building structure in a single architectural form … They convert the building itself into one vast electrical advertisement … The structure itself takes on the hyperbole of advertising …
Here is a Union 76 station in Beverly Hills, at Santa Monica Boulevard and Crescent Drive, built in 1964. Jim Wong of Pereira Associates designed it. He actually designed it in 1960, for the Los Angeles airport. He told me he wanted to express the sense of motion around the airport … the flow of cars as well as planes … It looks like a pagoda style from most angles, but it is really a huge spherical triangle resting on three piers with curving soffits … Standard Oil bid lower for the airport station and got the site. As a matter of fact, they put up a remarkable piece of electro-graphic architecture of their own … Anyway, Union 76 eventually decided to build Wong’s fantasy in Beverly Hills … If any building ever proved that electro-graphic architecture works commercially, it was this one … There was a Union 76 station on the site already. It was pumping 100,000 gallons of gasoline a month, which was high, even by Los Angeles standards … A month after Wong’s building went up, business increased 50 per cent, to 150,000 gallons a month …
Here is one of the first large buildings in Los Angeles that was designed to express not a structural form but a graphic form … the Crenshaw Ford agency on Crenshaw Boulevard at 52nd Street in Los Angeles … The whole building is designed around the big curved corner facade. The corner was designed solely to accommodate the shape of the first letter in FORD … Since then the graphics in electro-graphic architecture have moved from mere lettering to whole structures designed primarily as pictures or representational sculpture, everything from drive-in theatres to a restaurant in Long Beach (no longer standing) in which the walls were huge and very sharply defined color photographs of steaks, chops, salads, sundaes, drinks … Entire walls were back-lit, like the huge photo-mural in Grand Central Station advertising Kodak … A whole building expressing a gigantic sirloin, medium-rare, with french fries … and why not! … That’s what we have here, motoring friends …
I talked to Sal Merendino, a Los Angeles industrial designer and teacher. He told me he sees this kind of super-electrographics as a great new wave of urban design: “I can see this sort of panels being done by really first-rate graphic designers, like Saul Bass or Gregory Kepes. Why should buildings always express merely their own structure? Why shouldn’t they express what’s inside? I think panels like this could be used with great warmth, joy and good taste. A city ought to be joyous. There’s enough severity in a city anyway, without striving for it in architecture. In one sense we ought to forget the idea of Architecture in cities. I think if you call it Architecture, you get screwed up. You end up setting these old standards for yourself. Architects want something that makes them look good when it’s photographed and printed on coated stock in some grand book on the history of architecture. It’s time we started thinking about what people who live in cities really want and need. All my beliefs end up with that. I think people need and want warmth and love and joy and good taste in their environment, and I think really good graphic panels would be a big step in that direction.”
The whole idea is so far away from the conventional Bauhaus notion of what a structure ought to express that it’s — exhilarating. It’s beyond baroque! beyond mannerist! … In fact, it is really hard to figure out how the old Bauhaus ideals of “structural honesty” and “a pure art of use of usefulness” … of functionalism, in short … have hung on so long. After all, the whole idea came out of the political atmosphere of post-World War I Europe. A desperate time, brothers … “Brothers of the world bend your knees … The proletarian armies of the world have grasped at the stars, destroying and building at the same time in a heavenly craving for justice and love … brothers, lift up your hearts and eyes high to the firmament, and the ridiculous national boundary stone will be no obstacle to a single fatherland for us all — the World — the Earth!” This was a manifesto of the November Group in 1919, a group of radical German artists concerned chiefly with architecture … Out of the November Group grew the Workers Circle, including Walter Gropius, guru of the Bauhaus … which, in turn, was the mother of it all, the rectangular straight-line functional serious “modern” architecture of Europe and America … Serious architects became obsessed with the idea that structure should be “expressed honestly” … Honesty usually meant straight lines and right angles. Serious architects were very slow to shape newer materials like reinforced concrete into the sort of fantastic curved shells and soffits that Saarinen became famous for in the early 1960s … Serious architects still tend to regard exterior decoration as dishonest. Electric tubing is still gauche … or, at best, camp … Back-lit plastic facings and acrylic paints — I doubt if many serious architects have ever thought about them in terms of architecture. Underneath it all, they have a terrific nostalgie de la château. They can’t get it out of their systems …
It was left to commercial artists in towns like Los Angeles, Las Vegas and San Diego to create something wild enough and baroque enough to express the new age of motion and mass wealth. There is a terrific Eastern intellectual snobbery about Los Angeles as a city of sprawl, chaos, madness, strangled by the automobile … Nostalgie de la château! … I still hear people in New York say that the trouble with Los Angeles is that it has no landmarks, you can never orient yourself. I doubt that anybody who lives in Los Angeles feels that way. In fact, Los Angeles has the most monumental landmarks ever built, namely, the freeways. Periodically, the upper social orders of Los Angeles try to bring the city’s architecture in line with the dictates of the New York art status sphere and its ancient ideas of monumentality — nostalgie de la Lincoln Center! — by sponsoring museums, culture centers, grand plazas … Invariably they end up as great … lumps, compared to the curvilinear forms of the freeways and all the forms of car fantasy architecture that go with them …
And so much goes with them; yes. The freeways are elevated at many points and for many miles, in the form of what in New York would be called skyways. They are anywhere from 20 to 100 feet above the ground in curving shapes, with these great heron-neck light stanchions curving over them like some endless Yves Tanguy decoration … The great spaces between the skyways are unified by a constellation of other objects of light and color thrust high up into the air: signs, electric displays, banners, towers, spires … like the scores of lit-up orange globes of the Union 76 stations, full-fledged electro-graphic architecture, like the McDonald’s Hamburger golden arches … and, everywhere you go, clusters of light stanchions over car lots with flat wing-shaped banks of electric tubing at the top … these light displays in themselves are more interesting than most of what serious light sculptors have accomplished, for my money …
Many of these spires and luminous objects, shooting up or floating in the atmosphere, have no function whatsoever other than display … They are there for visual excitement. Functionalism — the hell with it! … The Los Angeles car washes especially … They violate all the canons of 50-year-old Modernism with a verve that would drive Mies off the platter … The car washes are very simple structures, basically, just open sheds, but they send their supporting columns 10, 20, 30 feet up into the air with a kind of pure Low-Rent L.A exuberance.
Other structures of the most massive or towering sort will have little ornaments stuck on top after a kind of Star-on-top-the-Christmas-Tree principle, as in Zeitvogel’s BUICK … I noticed the same thing throughout Las Vegas. At first it just seemed terribly gauche. But gradually I saw that it has an important psychological function in the modern city … It tames the impersonal massiveness and severity … Hey! it says, this is a laugh and a half! … It’s like the old Low-Rent car jockeys with a pair of Styrofoam dice hanging from the rearview mirror of their Cadillac and a da-da-da-da-dum-dum-dum musical horn under the hood … Domesticate the beast …
Frankly, it is very ironic that the national Beautification program is now beginning to catch on around Los Angeles in the form of local zoning ordinances requiring that commercial buildings and displays conform to conventional local building designs … in other words, to the traditional static forms, the bungalows, the two-story stores, that have been there longer … The new genre of gasoline stations has pitched roofs and rubble facing — nostalgie de la Quaint & Rural … The truth is … how drab Los Angeles, San Diego and hundreds of other American cities and towns and crossroads would be without the electro-graphic car fantasy mobile architecture that America’s avant-garde commercial artists have given them … Someone must write the new book, now, fast, on the most lavish coated stock, $18.50 a copy, called Beyond Modern Architecture, featuring … well, for a start — Melvin Zeitvogel …