architectural critics and planners had noted for years: the landscape of post-World War II
America had been planned around automobiles more than around people. Reflecting the
nation’s great enthusiasm for automobility, the 20th-century landscape integrated this
transportation infrastructure and allowed it a defining influence. In some ways, this
dominance snuck up on many Americans; yet such change is more attributable to blinded
free choice than to naïveté: the 20th-century American lived under the spell of the open
road.
Although the United States seized the invention, the automobile was first developed in
Europe in the 1890s. French manufacturers marketed the first successful automobile in
1894. Inconvenience from a lack of roads and infrastructure as well as a dependence on
transportation technologies such as trolleys precluded Americans from rapidly accepting
the new “horseless carriage.” The manufacturing and marketing efforts of Henry Ford
and others changed this attitude by 1913, when there was one motor vehicle to every
eight Americans. Mass production made sure that by the 1920s, the car had become no
longer a luxury but a necessity of American middle-class life. The landscape, however,
had been designed around other modes of transport, including an urban scene dependent
on foot travel. Cars enabled an independence never before possible, if they were
supported with the necessary service structure. Massive architectural shifts were
necessary to make way for the automobile, as architects and planners reconfigured urban
street forms or designed new building types to accommodate the automobile. Congested
streets forced motorists to park and store their automobiles in a new building, the parking
garage. Early garages included mechanical systems and elevators to carry cars into tall
skyscraperlike garages. Smaller garages affiliated with hotels or commercial districts
proliferated. After World War II, motorists could select garages with attendants or, more
commonly by the 1970s and after, they could use self-park garages. By the 1990s,
architects were designing tall garages for hundreds of cars. With retail storefronts at the
pedestrian level, many urban garages were designed to blend in with neighboring
buildings and styles.
Although the motorcar was the quintessential private instrument, its owners had to
operate it over public spaces. Who would pay for these public thoroughfares? After a
period of acclimation, Americans viewed highway building as a form of social and
economic therapy. They justified public financing for such projects on the theory that
roadway improvements would pay for themselves by increasing property-tax revenues
along the route. At this time, asphalt, macadam, and concrete were each used on different
roadways.
By the 1920s, the congested streets of urban areas pressed road building into other
areas. Most urban regions soon proposed express streets without stoplights or
intersections. These aesthetically conceived roadways, normally following the natural
topography of the land, soon took the name “parkways.” Long Island and Westchester
County, New York, used parkways with bridges and tunnels to separate these express
routes from local cross traffic. The Bronx River Parkway (1906), for instance, follows a
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 170
river park and forest; it also is the first roadway to be declared a national historic site. In
addition to pleasure driving, such roads stimulated automobile commuting.
The Federal Road Act of 1916 offered funds to states that organized highway
departments, designating 200,000 miles of road as primary and thus eligible for federal
funds. More important, ensuing legislation also created a Bureau of Public Roads to plan
a highway network to connect all cities of 50,000 or more inhabitants. Some states
adopted gasoline taxes to help finance the new roads. By 1925 the value of highway
construction projects exceeded $1 billion. Expansion continued through the Great
Depression, with road building becoming integral to city and town development.
Robert Moses of New York defined this new role as road builder and social planner.
Through his work in the greater New York City area (1928–60), Moses created a model
for a metropolis that included and even emphasized the automobile as opposed to mass
transportation. This was a dramatic change in the motivation of design. Historian Clay
McShane (1994) writes, “In their headlong search for modernity through mobility,
American urbanites made a decision to destroy the living environments of nineteenthcentury
neighborhoods by converting their gathering places into traffic jams, their
playgrounds into motorways, and their shopping places into elongated parking lots.”
Outside of cities in the United States, major efforts were underway to knit
the nation together on a larger scale. In the 1910s, motorists and
commercial forces joined in the good-roads movement to establish early
national highways, such as the Lincoln Highway and the Dixie Highway.
Route 66, stretching southwest from Chicago through Illinois, Missouri,
Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, ending
at Los Angeles, was to become the most celebrated interstate roadway.
While the road supplied an exodus for many Dust Bowl sufferers in the
1930s, Route 66 became even more important as a symbol. “Get your
kicks on Route 66” echoed through many musical moments as well as in
minutes of personal longing. For Americans, “America’s Main Street”
opened up westward and ushered in a period of comfortable cruising in
American automobiles. Probably more than any other roadway, Route 66
allowed the automobile to become a means for expressing the American
tradition of independence and freedom. Planners, designers, and
entrepreneurs sought methods to stimulate and take advantage of this new
American passion.
Aerial view of a housing development in Levittown, New York
Drivers through the 1930s often slept in roadside yards, so developers soon took
advantage of this opportunity by devising the roadside camp or motel. Independently
owned tourist camps graduated from tents to cabins, which were often called “motor
courts.” After World War II, the form became a motel, in which all the rooms were tied
together in one structure. Still independently owned, by 1956 there were 70,000 motels
nationwide. Best Western and Holiday Inn soon used ideas of prefabrication to create
chains of motels throughout the United States. Holiday Inn defined this new part of the
automobile landscape by emphasizing uniformity so that travelers felt as if they were in a
familiar environment no matter where they traveled.
The automobile landscape, of course, needed to effectively incorporate its essential
raw material: petroleum. The gas station, which originally existed as little more than a
roadside shack, mirrors the evolution of the automobile-related architecture in general.
By the 1920s, filling stations had integrated garages and service facilities. These facilities
were privately owned and uniquely constructed. By the mid-1930s, oil giants, such as
Shell and Texaco, developed a range of prototype gas stations that would re-create the
site as a showroom for tires, motor oil, or other services. The architectural style clearly
derived from the International Style, with a sleek, white appearance. While carefully
dressed attendants were a vital part of the experience at many service stations, George
Urich introduced the United States’ first self-service gas station in California in 1947. By
the 1990s, this form had been further streamlined to include convenience stores and the
opportunity to pay at the pump. The gas station experience would steadily become less
personalized.
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 172
As automobiles became more familiar in everyday Americans’ lives, planners and
developers formalized refueling stations for the human drivers as well. Food stands
informally provided refreshment during these early days, but soon restaurants were
developed that utilized marketing strategies from the motel and petroleum industries.
Diners and family restaurants sought prime locations along frequently traveled roads;
however, these forms did not alter dining patterns significantly. White Castle (1921)
combined the food stand with the restaurant to create a restaurant that could be put almost
anywhere. Drive-in restaurants would evolve around the idea of quick service, often
allowing drivers to remain in their automobile. Fast food as a concept, of course, derives
specifically from Ray Kroc and the McDonald’s concept that he marketed out of
California (1952). Clearly the idea of providing service to automobile drivers had created
an entire offshoot of the restaurant industry.
Whereas most roadside building types evolved gradually, the drive-in theater was
deliberately invented. Richard M.Hollingshead Jr., of New Jersey, believed that
entertainment needed to incorporate the automobile. Hollingshead patented the first
drive-in in 1933, but the invention would not proliferate until the 1950s. Viewing outdoor
films in one’s car has become a symbol of the culture of consumption that overtook the
American middle class during the postwar era. Of course, it also established the
automobile as a portable, private oasis where youth could express their sexuality as well
as experiment with drugs and alcohol.
Most of these developments redefined the local landscape while creating few national
thoroughfares. President Dwight D. Eisenhower changed this in the 1950s. In 1920 he
had led troops across the American road system in a military call for new roads. Then he
had witnessed the spectacle of Hitler’s Autobahn firsthand. When he became president,
he worked with automobile manufacturers and others to devise a 1956 plan to connect
America’s future to the automobile. The interstate highway system was the most
expensive public works project in human history. The public rationale for this hefty
project revolved around fear of nuclear war: such roadways would assist in exiting urban
centers in the event of such a calamity. The emphasis, however, was clearly economic
expansion. At the cost of many older urban neighborhoods—often occupied by minority
groups—the huge wave of concrete was unrolled that linked all the major cities of the
nation.
With the national future clearly tied to cars, planners began perfecting ways of further
integrating the automobile into American domestic life. Initially, these tactics were quite
literal. In the early 20th century, many homes of wealthy Americans soon required the
ability to store vehicles. Most often, these homes had carriage houses or stables that could
be converted. Soon, of course, architects devised an appendage to the home and gave it
the French name “garage.” From this early point, housing in the United States closely
followed the integration of the automobile and roads into American life.
Upper- and middle-class Americans had begun moving to suburban areas in the late
1800s. The first suburban developments, such as Llewellyn Park, New Jersey (1856),
followed train lines or the corridors of other early mass transit. The automobile allowed
access to vast areas between and beyond these corridors. Suddenly, the suburban
hinterland around every city compounded. As early as 1940, about 13 million people
lived in communities beyond the reach of public transportation. Because of these
changes, suburbs could be planned for less wealthy Americans.
Entries A–F 173
Modeled after the original Gustav Stickley homes or similar designs from Ladies Home J ournal and other
popular magazines, middle-class suburbs appealed to working- and middle-class
Americans. The bungalow became one of the most popular designs in the nation. The
construction halt of the Great Depression set the stage for more recent ideas and designs,
including the ranch house. The basic features of the ranch house—its simple, informal,
one-story structure; its low-pitched eaves; and its large expanse of glass that included
“picture” windows—were fused in the public mind with the easygoing lifestyle identified
with the Southwest and West Coast.
Planners used home styles such as these to develop one site after another with the
automobile linking each one to the outside world. The world of Levittown (the first of
which was constructed in 1947) involved a complete dependence on automobile travel.
This shift to suburban living became a hallmark of the late 20th century, with over half
the nation residing in suburbs by the 1990s. The planning system that supported this
residential world, however, involved much more than roads. The services necessary to
support outlying, suburban communities also needed to be integrated by planners.
Instead of the Main Street prototype, the automobile suburbs demanded a new form.
Initially, planners such as Jesse Clyde Nichols devised shopping areas, such as Kansas
City’s Country Club District (1922), that appeared a hybrid of previous forms. In Lake
Forest, Illinois, Howard Van Doren Shaw designed Market Square (1916), perhaps the
first shopping center planned to address the automobile. Soon, however, the “strip” had
evolved as the commercial corridor of the future. These sites quickly became part of
suburban development in order to provide basic services close to home. A shopper rarely
arrived without an automobile; therefore, the car needed to be part of the design program.
The most obvious architectural development for speed was signage: integrated into the
overall site plan would be towering neon aberrations that identified services. In addition,
parking lots and drive-through windows suggest the integral role of transportation in this
new commerce.
These developments culminated in the shopping mall, which quickly became a
necessary portion of strip planning. By the 1970s, developers’ initiatives clearly included
regional economic development for a newly evolving service and retail world.
Incorporating suburbs into such development plans, designs for these pseudocommunities
were held together by the automobile. The marketplace for this culture quickly became
the shopping mall. Strip malls, which open onto roadways and parking lots, were
installed near residential areas as suburbs extended further from the city center.
Developers then perfected the self-sustained, enclosed shopping mall, which became the
symbol of a culture of conspicuous consumption that many Americans have criticized
since its first appearance. Try as they might, developers could never re-create the culture
of local communities in these new artificial environments.
Critics such as Jane Jacobs and James Kunstler identified an intrinsic bias on the
American landscape in the 1970s. Kunstler writes, “Americans have been living carcentered
lives for so long that the collective memory of what used to make a landscape or
a townscape or even a suburb humanly rewarding has nearly been erased.” The 1990s
closed with the unfolding of the new politics of urban sprawl. “I’ve come to the
conclusion,” explained Vice President Al Gore on the campaign trail in 1999, “that what
we really are faced with here is a systematic change from a pattern of uncontrolled sprawl
toward a brand new path that makes quality of life the goal of all our urban, suburban,
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 174
and farmland policies.” During the 20th century, planners and designers gave Americans
what they wanted: a life and landscape married to the automobile. A divorce will require
an entirely revised architectural program.
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