California Kitsch Made Concrete

The California myth is perhaps most overt in the so-called “programmatic” or novelty roadside architecture of the early twentieth century, the massive plaster animals and igloo-shaped buildings that line the freeways, beckoning passersby to stop for a photo-op or a snow cone on a hot day. These attractions are the focus of the recent reprint of Jim Heimann’s California Crazy: American Pop Architecture, a survey of fantastic buildings designed to look, for example, like the gigantic dappled donut perched atop a small donut shop in Inglewood, or the dinosaurs that famously roam the I-10 en route to Palm Desert. Such buildings make the city in their image, a spectacular playground dreamed up by entrepreneurs with a penchant for plaster.