Bob Peck Chevrolet building, Ballston, VA

There isn’t much that’s distinctive about Arlington, VA. The rooms and snacks at NSDL’s conference hotel, the Westin, were great - they were just as good as in any Westin anywhere - but that’s the point. Arlington is anywhere and nowhere. Except for the building across the street.

The windows opposite the hotel’s meeting rooms looked out on the former home of Bob Peck Chevrolet, a landmark in Fairfax County since it was built in 1964. Designed by Anthony Musolleno, the building’s facade exemplifies the wacky modernist space-age style of architecture known as Googie. This is the same zeitgeist that gave us the spaceship-shaped terminal at the Los Angeles Airport, gas stations with huge circular slabs of concrete suspended over the pumps, and diners with swooping triangular pillars made of bright yellow tin.

“Even if you didn’t know what was inside [Bob Peck Chevrolet], the building was from a time when there was expression in architecture,” said Mary Briggs, head of Fairfax County’s Cultural Affairs Division, in The Washington Post. “It was postwar. We were going places. It was the space age. It was probably one of the last relics in Arlington that was that distinctive.”

The land Bob Peck owned became too valuable to sell cars; a developer bought it in 2006 and, although he made noises about how much he liked the old building too, you and I both know what’s going to go up over there. So before the wrecker finishes its job, give a nod to 1964. We won’t see it again.