BOOMERANG FORMICA

No motif evokes mid-twentieth-century diner culture more fully than boomerang Formica, a material and pattern still found—usually very well worn— on counters and tables in hash houses that never gentrified . . . or those seeking a retro look. The design was created in 1950 and predates other such quaintly dated images of modernity as the automobile tailfin and the atomic molecule motif.

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Boomerang Formica’s formal name is Skylark.

Formica itself goes back to 1913, when it was created and named because its heat-resistant properties made it a good substitute for mica, which was used as insulation in electric motors. In 1950, as Americans were poised to move to the suburbs and surround themselves with convenient, modern kitchens, Brooks Stevens Associates designed the Skylark pattern—a series of similar-but-not-identical thin-lined boomerang-shaped outlines in one, two, or three colors, overlapping one another on a plain Formica surface. The design was finessed four years later by Nettie Hart of Raymond Loewy Associates, and the result was a then-ultra-stylish pattern suggesting supersonic airplane wings.

The boomerang pattern on anything was considered as modern as tomorrow; on Formica, the manmade miracle plastic, it was an epiphany of jet-age design. The truly inspired thing about Skylark Formica is that it was not made to look like artificial wood or stone or even linoleum. It was Formica, and darn proud of it! The dancing boomerangs signify a triumph of manmade plastic over such archaic materials as wood or marble. That ingenuous faith in better living through science is why Skylark pattern Formica today has become an amusing emblem of a time when one-upping nature was a virtue.

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An especially stylish boomerang Formica counter, all black and white.