EXUBERANTLY GOOGIE

Our chariot, the one that will carry us on an extraordinary journey through space and time, awaits. It is a 320-horsepower, gimme-a-ticket scarlet ragtop Camaro, a brutal, throwback muscle car throbbing expectantly at a parking meter on Ventura Boulevard, poised for flight in front of . . . what to call it?

A building; yes, certainly that. It has walls and windows and doors, but it is one strange structure, painted an eye-searing green, the color one might find on a frog’s belly stretched out on a dissecting pan; a scrum of swooping, porthole-pierced columns and stamped-metal screens and awnings and louvers. If you thought that this might be an appropriate home for, say, George Jetson and his Atom Age brood, you’d be right.

For this is the Hanna-Barbera studio building, where they were born, or, more accurately, drawn--a veritable assembly line of ‘toons: Flintstones and Yogi Bear and Scooby Doo and scads of others.

Which brings us to the people gathered in the building’s shadow. They’re here to dry run an architectural tour orchestrated by the Los Angeles Conservancy, an organization of about 7,000 souls devoted to preserving the city’s architectural heritage--buildings, to be exact, just like the old animation factory. The conservancy fought--and lost--a struggle in 1997 to have the building designated a Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Landmark, which would have stayed the bulldozers for at least a year. Now the building exists in a kind of real-estate limbo. Either it will get a face-lift and survive, or face its close-up with the bulldozer. Thus this preview of their two-day tour, “How Modern Was My Valley,” which will ramble through the San Fernando Valley next weekend. For the tour, which has the Los Angeles Times Valley Edition among its seven sponsors, the conservancy is really selling a couple of things.

First, be nice to our historic buildings--”the architectural gems of the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s that still exist and can be viewed,” says the conservancy’s press release. A tough order for many, for this was a design era that harks back to avocado-green refrigerators, shag carpeting, boxlike buildings and Joni Mitchell songs lamenting the style’s sameness.

Second, maybe it’s time to take another look at the Valley itself. And that might be the tougher task. As Ken Bernstein, the conservancy’s director of preservation issues, observes in his tour guide preface: “To some cynics, the Valley remains a kind of backwater, representing nothing more than a land of sterile suburbia--repetitive tract housing, a homogenous population, wide streets and boring architecture--or even, in one waggish suggestion for naming a potential new Valley municipality, ‘Twenty-Nine Malls.’ ”

Yes, it’s a little tough to get your arms around this place that was created by commandeered water (think “Chinatown”). While the addition of the Valley in 1915 doubled Los Angeles’ square mileage, the continuing mutterings about Valley secession could just as easily wipe out all that land and tax revenue.

But then Bernstein adds, “We hope the tour will begin to change the way the rest of the city looks at the Valley, and the way the Valley looks at itself.”

Hope. Preservationists seem to have an unlimited supply of that.

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OUR LITTLE GROUP HAS ASSEMBLED IN FRONT OF THE HANNA-BARBERA building. The person running the show is Mary-Margaret Stratton, who’s “thirtysomething,” the tour’s producer and its progenitor. She fits right in with the animation building, dressed in a blouse with a retro pattern that might have come from one of the Jetsons drawing boards. She’s a “creative consultant,” doing freelance work in art direction, Web consulting and writing and project management, although this income stream has been on hold for the past year while she focuses on her beloved tour. She’s a Valley Gal who grew up in Sherman Oaks and attended Corvallis High School--in fact, her current neighborhood, Granada Hills, will be the tour’s grand finale.

The Camaro’s owner, Jeff Stork, is the tour’s co-producer. He’s “a child of the ‘60s” (what is it about people devoted to buildings of the past that makes them so diffident about their own ages?), affable, up-tempo, cheerful, as befits his day job as an area sales manager for General Motors, his territory stretching from West Los Angeles out through the Valley. He moved to the Valley in 1994 and now he loves it with the passion of the newly converted. Thus, the ragtop--the better to see architecture as he drives from dealer to dealer.

These rolling conservancy tours are “a unique L.A. phenomenon,” says Stratton as we clamber into Stork’s bomb. You drive around in a pack of architecture-lovers and “make friends with the people in the yellow Pinto in front of you,” she laughs. To make the caravaning easier on this tour, they’ll be giving the participants antenna balls.

We head north on Ventura Boulevard, then turn and cruise through the Glendale panhandle, past the precincts of Disney Imagineering, which occupies a platoon of industrial-era factories and warehouses and an especially tasty ‘50s-era bowling alley. Stratton concludes that Disney has done a pretty decent job of saving these structures, including the abandoned Glendale Airport’s Grand Central Terminal, a symphony of Deco zigzag and goddesses of transport grafted onto a Spanish Colonial substrate. It’s something Stratton calls “adaptive reuse,” which, as it turns out, is a potent buzzword among architectural preservationists.

Says Bernstein, “To preservationists, a building that sits vacant with no present-day or future use is not tremendously valuable. Preservation is about saving special places for people to be able to use and enjoy into the future.”

Sounds almost easy, but as Stewart Brand says in his book, “How Buildings Learn”: “Form follows funding. Commerce drives all before it, especially in cities. Wherever land value is measured in square feet, buildings are as fungible as cash. Cities devour buildings.”

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WE CLAMBER OUT AT ONE OF THE TOUR’S FIRST PHOTO-OPS--BURBANK City Hall. We pass the prancing fountain with cute little turquoise fish happily spouting, climb the grand entrance stairway into a lobby soaring two stories toward a mural of . . . workers! Machines! Airplanes! Industry! Belching steam engines! Our little ooh-and-aah group is intercepted by City Council Secretary Karen Turner, who offers to show us around. She’s been a City Hall employee for 13 years, and her impromptu architectural tour shows that she really knows the place. And loves it unabashedly.

Stratton and Stork make half-hearted attempts to break away-- the tour must press on--but succumb to Turner’s display of the building’s offices, the council chambers, where a renovation will take out the dreadful fiberglass dropped ceiling to expose sculpted Deco plasterwork. Here, c’mon into the mayor’s office! See, he had the ceiling torn off, and isn’t that Deco trim a sight? Outside, we take a last look.

Says Stork, “You can tell this building was built at the edge of a crisis,” and he’s right: The place is crawling with eagles, soldiers, warplanes. “A very patriotic building, a snapshot of the country’s mood in 1941.”

We depart, and a few blocks later we’re in dream-factory Burbank, motoring past the postmodern Disney world headquarters with its 20-foot-high dwarfs holding up the roof. So iconic. So self-referential.

We turn off Riverside Drive at Hollywood Way. Stork points out the Lakeside Car Wash--”It’s the best one in Southern California, a study in lava rock and wood.”

He says there’s a lively debate within the conservancy about preserving these auto-age artifacts, and not just any carwashes, but the real screamers, the ones with soaring (and completely nonfunctional) pylons and blipping signs, the very shrieking essence of L.A.’s look-at-me architecture.

The group responsible for taking a stand on carwashes is one of the conservancy’s key subcommittees, the commercial council. It had met a few days before the Valley tour’s dry run, appropriately enough, in the ‘50s-era Astro Coffee Shop in Silver Lake. On this night’s menu, so to speak, were buildings about to be served up on the demolition platter: the Googie-style Johnie’s coffee shop on Wilshire Boulevard, the Gilmore Bank building in Farmers Market, the Glendale Federal Bank building on Brand Boulevard.

Chairman Alan Leib, a filmmaker, is typical of the council’s watchdogs. It was he who discovered that Glendale Fed, a 1959 “Brasilia futuristic-style” building on Glendale’s high-rise row, was in trouble. “Someone said they heard the bank was closing. So I went down there and asked the teller if it was true, and she said, ‘Yes.’ ” he says. “Then I went upstairs and saw that everyone was packing their stuff. I thought, ‘This isn’t good.’ ”

Talk then turned to carwashes, clearly a delicate issue. One of the council members said he had obtained a list of 22 “important” locations, which kicked off an Altmanesque discussion-cum-debate about what’s really important, carwash-wise. There was a passionately pro-Lakeside faction and a faction made up of those who thought the place was, well, perhaps not quite exuberant enough. Leib made a stab at resolution: “Let’s start the process of people being [angry]. We’ve got to pick one that sets the stage for others in the future.”

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STORK SPINS THE WHEEL AND WE TURN BACK ONTO RIVERSIDE Drive, which brings us to the very Kaaba of preservation in Los Angeles--and one of its great success stories--Bob’s Big Boy in Toluca Lake.

There was a bruising battle back in 1992 over the restaurant’s fate. The owner wanted to replace the 1949 eatery with an office tower. But a funny thing happened on the way to demolition: The conservancy and community bullied, seduced, incentivized--whatever--the owner into giving the place another shot. He cleaned it up, started merchandising the place’s historic connotations and bingo! Cash registers started ringing. The Toluca Lake location is now one of the nation’s top-grossing Big Boy restaurants.

“It’s building as sign,” Stork marvels. “Even though the sign is free-standing, it’s an integral part of the structure. The architectural balance of the length of the roof is offset by the height of the sign.

“I see Bob’s as postwar exuberance,” he continues. “They had a giant lot full of nothing. They built an enormous sign. They neon-laced the sign. They neon-laced the building--the whole building is a gentle curve that accommodates the roadway. Money is being spent. Bob’s is a statement about postwar optimism. It says, ‘We’re going to do well here. The economy is going to be good. We have a good feeling.’ ”

The building was designed by Wayne McAllister, one of the midcentury masters of the architectural style called (with much derision on the part of East Coast archo-snobs) “Googie,” after an L.A. coffee shop, now sadly demolished. Googie’s was one of the first restaurants whose architecture was specifically tuned to eyes moving at traffic speed. Massive cantilevered roofs appeared to defy laws of gravity; bongo typefaces screamed in backlit plastic; walls and windows tilted at vertiginous angles.

It was all very futuristic and optimistic, as giddy as a Jetsons cartoon--but it also was too decorative for the era’s reigning icy-cool high priests of architecture, the “form-follows-function” fellows like Le Corbusier, who intoned, with deadly seriousness, “There is only one right angle; but there is an infinitude of other angles. The right angle, therefore, has superior rights over other angles.”

And that’s the kind of architecture that most folks, if they think about it at all, associate with the word “Modern.” Big boxes, flat roofs, colorless, tailored, clean to the point of sterility. But that one “narrow type of architecture . . . was only a narrow part of the spectrum of modernism,” says Alan Hess, whose seminal 1986 book “Googie,” by all accounts, began the serious reappraisal of Jetson-Modern that has culminated in events such as the tour.

“There was all of this other design, from Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic architecture to the popular modernism of Googie, but it didn’t get the attention of the museums, of the architecture magazines, and so it was pretty much written out of the history books until the mid-1980s.

“That was one of the reasons I wrote the book,” adds Hess, a UCLA-trained architect and, for the past 14 years, architecture critic at the San Jose Mercury News. “I wanted to get people excited and inspired by this whole era of architecture that was just completely disappearing without much note or fuss or concern. Pretty much the attitude at that time was, you know, good riddance.”

But Bob’s was saved; indeed, it seems to have triumphed. The Modernist “flash-cube” building that forms its backdrop looks dated. The worm has turned: Here on Riverside Drive, Googie rules!

But farther along Ventura Boulevard we run into, well--a box. “A glass box,” Stork corrects. And so it is: Casa de Cadillac, a pristine example of “High Modernism,” the so-called International Style that once dominated and then, as all triumphant styles do, took its knocks. Tom Wolfe lampooned its pretensions savagely in “From Bauhaus to Our House”: “So what if you were living in a building that looked like a factory and felt like a factory, and paying top dollar for it? Every modern building of quality looked like a factory.”

It had to do with the International Style’s pretensions, that a building could change people, not the other way around. “Most of the ‘classics’ of Utopian planning have come to look inhuman or even absurd; they have ceased to work,” said Robert Hughes in his book “The Shock of the New.” “Who believes in progress and perfectibility any more? Who believes in master builders or formgivers?” International Style down; Googie up! How very ironic. But, weirdly enough, after spending a few minutes in this austere Cadillac cube, you see that, in its own cool, tailored way, it is, as Stork says, “a fun building.”

There’s a hidden little atrium with carefully tended plants that gives an almost theological bent to the question, “Is it inside or outside?” The design fits together; space flows. Not only that, but this 1947 structure is still functional, Stork says. “On a given month they’re no worse than third-largest [in sales among regional Cadillac dealers]. To me it’s the best showroom in Southern California. It’s not one of these showrooms that’s set back 200 feet from the road, 12 rows of cars in front of it.”

Stratton, meanwhile, has her own point of reference: “I grew up a block and a half from that building. It’s almost impossible to see it through a grown-up’s eyes. I just see it as this beautiful building I walked by on my way to school every day.”

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DEEPER INTO SUBURBIA: STORK SKEPTICALLY EYEBALLS MEL’S DRIVE-In on Ventura: “They’ve put early ‘50s touches on a late-’50s Atomic-style building--it’s angel food cake and ketchup.” We move past the Kester Avenue school, looking like any one of dozens of identical Southland open-plan schools. “It’s a difficult building to ooh and aah over unless you can really see,” Stratton says. “It’s one of those cases where the idea was so universal and so well-executed that it became ordinary.”

“I remember [visiting] California in the ‘70s and driving past schools and being shocked--open air, lock ers outside, people outside,” Stork says. It fits neatly with the Modernists’ obsessive fresh-air philosophy--”bathed in light and air,” as Le Corbusier enthused--all well and good, except when it rains.

We wind up the tour’s first day (but not ours) on Van Nuys Boulevard, at the sprawling civic complex: the 1932 Municipal Building, a scaled-down version of downtown L.A.’s City Hall; a police station with a pierced-concrete facade that looks, to the jaded eye, just like dozens of giant TV screens piled up; a tidy, tailored-looking library building that catches Stork’s eye: “They built a suspended footbridge just to make an aesthetic statement. They really tried to be remarkable.”

And, finally, the courthouse, a glass-and-stone shaft that lacks, how shall we say? A certain warmth. Responds Stratton, “Yes, it’s austere. Imposing. As a court building should be. I mean, it’s the law. “

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WE DRIVE A FEW MILES, LEAPFROGGING to the beginning of the second day’s tour: Pierce College, just off Winnetka Road. On campus is a curious and melancholy relic--the remnants of the Old Trapper’s Lodge, a typical ‘40s motel that happened to be in the way of the Burbank Airport expansion and was torn down. But not before preservationists saved a few of owner John Ehn’s extraordinary creations, statuary that sophisticates would now call “outsider art”: concrete, luridly painted sculptures, such as “Kidnapped,” a very dark Indian abducting a very white lady with her improbable red-painted navel; a simulated Boot Hill with tombstones--”Bill Boozer. 1800--1872. Fastest drunk in the West. He shot sober men.”

Ehn, who died in 1981, started his project in 1951. Says Stork: “Before there was an interstate highway system, there was Route 66. It was really a ragtag bunch of roads all strung together and a whole bunch of people trying to eke out a living alongside the highway. And they did it by offering the best pig sandwich and putting up a big neon sign. It wasn’t corporate America; it was mom and pop trying to eke out a living from the people going to California to change their lives.”

Soon we’re back in tract-house heaven, passing block after block of works by Edward Fickett, sometimes called “The Father of the Valley” for his low-slung, partly prefabricated houses. “Modernism for the masses,” Stratton says. “He’s another one of Los Angeles’ unsung heroes. He died a very quick, tragic death, before his time.”

We pass Cal State Northridge-- its student station, KCSN, will furnish the tour’s “soundtrack” with a daylong playlist of period songs for the duration of the tour. Up Topanga Canyon Road, through the true “Valley of the Malls.” Finally onto Sherman Way, where we pause at the astonishing Sven Lokrantz School. It’s a big, circular, gunmetal-blue building with a sweeping porte-cochere in a restrained Googie style. The kids have left for the day, but Stratton finds an open door and starts scoping the place out. It’s quite a building: grand circular halls surrounding an inner building, like a doughnut with its slightly smaller hole. In the open space are big pie-slice courtyards, filled with Modernist light and air.

We’re met by school coordinator Mary Jones, whose initial skepticism about our little group turns to unbridled enthusiasm about the building and its mission (the education of developmentally disabled children--Lokrantz, as it turns out, was a pioneer of corrective physical education). Jones leads us into the gymnasium, its floor a riot of random tiles. We then head into a former cafeteria, the ceiling dotted with jet-age light fixtures. “C’mon, when was the last time you saw salmon and turquoise?” she asks.

“If we didn’t have fences, these things would be down on Melrose Avenue in a heartbeat,” Jones laughs. Driving away, Stratton enthuses, “It’s a testament to the people who run that school that the spirit of the original design is still so evident.”

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SHADOWS ARE LENGTHENING (AS are the lines at the Valley’s notoriously archaic traffic lights) as we stop-and-go past the Tiki-style Tahitian Village apartments on Reseda Boulevard; the Googie First Lutheran Church of Northridge, with its boomerang bell tower and cantilevered roof line; then the Devonshire International House of Pancakes, with its rare “double-butterfly” A-frame. Finally we reach the tour’s denouement--Granada Hills. It’s where Stratton and her husband, Cary, moved after years of scrimping and saving and living in a one-room bachelor pad. Their grail was nothing less than one of the fabled Eichler homes.

This neighborhood is a mother lode of Eichlers, along with two other clusters in Orange and Thousand Oaks. We clamber out of Stork’s chariot at the foot of a steep drive leading up to Stratton’s manse. A sober, almost taciturn, facade greets us, but a step through the doorway brings us into a light-filled inner atrium; the house embracing the space with glass arms. The first, startled impression is one of transparency, like one of those architectural drawings in which the walls have been left out.

It’s a ‘60s time capsule: walls dotted with vintage Disneyland posters, a swooping floor lamp that Stratton scored for $10 at an estate sale, a “Seames” chair knockoff of the famous Eames lounger, a credenza from the estate of none other than Wayne McAllister, a progenitor of Googie. The kitchen is in mint condition; the range is set low so that mom can peer out into the family room; a built-in table swings out--an ingenious instant breakfast bar.

This may be the only house in architectural history to be named for a developer--the idiosyncratic, driven Joseph Eichler, a butter wholesaler who rented a Frank Lloyd Wright house in the Bay Area during World War II and thereafter was never quite the same. He built mostly in Northern California (11,000 houses), far fewer in the Southland (all that glass gave the homes a reputation for being a trifle toasty). He was stubborn about materials; was one of the first developers to sell to minorities; refused to cut corners and went bust by 1967.

“I’m drawn to the Modern style because of the marriage of interior and exterior spaces,” Stratton says. “I love being in the house and looking outside and seeing the house extending into the outside space, and being outside and seeing the reverse.” Stork chimes in: “I’m amazed at what [Eichler] thought was important and what was not important. The Philippines mahogany was important--they always had it. The flooring was not important, it was just linoleum.”

Still, he adds, the house has “aged so gracefully. Our joke is that Stratton’s house is the summer of 1967. But when you look at it, it’s very suitable for today. To me it’s the quintessential California house.”

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WE SAY OUR FAREWELLS. ONE senses that Stratton and Stork will have some postpartum blues when the tour is over Nov. 20.

But perhaps they will have inched their cause forward, adding to the appreciation of our exuberant, overconfident, hopeful, contradictory century’s architecture. Opening up the redefinition of what was great architecture--not pushing the International Style survivors out of the preservation lifeboat, but inviting in home-grown geniuses such as Wayne McAllister and Googie. Struggling to keep the city (which is to say, the rest of us) from devouring its own fragile past.

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Some resources, printed and electronic, for more information about Modernism.

Books: “Googie,” by Alan Hess (Chronicle Books). Bible of the Googie restoration; wonderfully illustrated, although a bit melancholy when you consider the number of buildings lost.

“From Bauhaus to Our House,” by Tom Wolfe (Bantam). A lively demolition of the last art form whose practitioners really thought they would change the world.

“How Buildings Learn,” by Stewart Brand (Viking Penguin). A study of “buildings in time” that instantly changes perceptions of how architecture works.

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Web sites: https://www.la

conservancy.org. The organization’s tidy Web site lists activities, projects and information about the Valley Tour. A site specifically dedicated to the Valley tour is at https://valleytour.com.

https://home.fea.net/~cjepsen/

Googie.htm. A great place to enter the world of Googie. Excellent graphics. Boomerangs predominate.

https://www.eichlernetwork.com/. Home for all things Eichler, everything from earnest discussions about radiant heating (Eichler put heating coils in the foundation slab) to Eichlers for sale.