Pumping Gas

When Stevan Dohanos painted a monumental vision of a Wayne Gas Pump for a feature in Fortune magazine in 1937, he knew exactly what he was doing. In a restless nation founded and built on mobility, the filling station supplied the lifeblood of internal combustion without which the Southern Diaspora and the Dustbowl Migration might never have happened. The essential agent of distribution was the gasoline pump and Dohanos already had a sense of its mythic importance and transformational power. Acquisition of a motor car was the first duty of the American citizen and the ability to travel at will rapidly evolved into a fundamental human freedom. A massive carved gas pump would not have looked out of place on Mount Rushmore. Neolithic civilisation provided Europe with a vast network of standing stones - America got the gas pump. The founding fortunes of American business were derived from oil and gas which paid for generations of political power and influence as well as the great collections of Old Masters, Impressionism and Modernism that line the walls of America’s art museums from the Getty to MoMA and all points in between.

America was served by 4 major producers of gasoline pumps, of which the Wayne Pump Company of Fort Wayne, Indiana was the largest and most active in self-promotion. In this 1940 ad they are addressing the general readership of the Saturday Evening Post, educating the public in the virtues of their products. An expensive PR exercise given that it’s hardly likely that any reader would be in the market for a gas pump or be prepared to cruise around the neighbourhood in search of a gas station equipped with Wayne pumps. Flattered by the low level viewpoint the gas pump stands tall and proud, radiating integrity and benevolence, defying the encroaching darkness. A grinning uniformed attendant sprints towards us, arm upraised in respectful greeting.

The architecture of the gas station has made a defining contribution to the American scene. A nation of citizens born to compete with one another rose to the challenge, opening a multitude of facilities along every highway. Compelled by commercial pressures the owners experimented with a variety of exotic and eccentric formats to attract the passing customer. This lead to a proliferation of pagodas, dinosaurs, giant coffee pots, tepees, windmills, lighthouses and country cottages. A popular move was to instal a redundant aircraft or zeppelin on the roof to seduce the insatiably curious. A celebrated example in Missouri took the form of a giant gas pump. A typical gas station would become a riot of signage and branding, an emblem of American vernacular and a magnet for documentary photographers intent on capturing the spirit of the Thirties.

This architectural free-for-all gradually gave way to a more considered approach as the major producers increased their control over distribution, building their own chains of gas stations and employing their own teams of architects drawing up standardised designs. Most architects, with an eye to their professional reputation would be loth to bring their talents to such a mundane task. Two exceptions to this were Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe. Wright designed a gas station in 1958 for a client whose home he had designed in Cloquet, Minnesota. Ten years later, the Nuns’ Island gas station opened in Montreal to a design, loosely attributed to Mies but implemented by a former colleague, Joe Fujikawa. While Wright’s filling station is still pumping gas, in Montreal the work of Mies and Fujikawa has been imaginatively and respectfully converted into a community centre that opened in 2019.

Off the Shelf - Villages of Vision, Gillian Darley

There are three editions of Villages of Vision on the shelf, including the hardback version from 1975. But this paperback from Paladin Books, issued in 1978, is my personal favourite. It came with a superb cover illustration by much under-rated artist/illustrator, Tony Meeuwissen, of meticulously painted vignettes of vernacular detail presented as if they were Victorian scrapbook stickers, seeming as fresh and inventive today as it did more than 40 years ago. The intersecting themes of this book embrace social history, industrial architecture, garden cities, capitalist paternalism, rural life, utopianism, philanthropy, political activism and noblesse oblige as the writer explores the subject of planned settlements and communities in the British Isles. It tells a story of good intentions, unfulfilled ambitions, broken dreams and social experimentation that extends into every corner of the country. A cast of mill-owners, Quaker businessmen, charlatans, utopians, idealists, and social reformers march across the pages. The Gazeteer has been an essential guide and companion on many a journey leading to such destinations as Saltaire and Port Sunlight, Bedford Park and Akroydon, Blaise Hamlet and Tremadog, and Edensor and Letchworth. Some of these trips have inspired posts on this blog, including Bedford Park, Blaise Hamlet, Saltaire, and Port Sunlight. The author is writer and broadcaster, Gillian Darley, whose 2003 book Factory has been equally inspirational. For the last 6 years Gillian Darley has been President of The Twentieth Century Society.

Postcard of the Day No. 83 – Hôtel Normandie

The Thirties fashion for maritime themed architecture reached a kind of end point with this example from the Belgian coast at Oostduinkerke near De Panne, built in 1933 as a restaurant. Rather than borrow the sweeping curves and raking profiles associated with marine architecture this developer settled for a coarse and ill-proportioned parody of an ocean liner complete with replica funnels. There’s a long and honourable tradition of this attention seeking, novelty design in the United States where B 52s or diplodocus masquerade as gas stations and drive-ins take the form of donuts and frankfurters – sometimes known as Roadside Vernacular. Without the great American wide open spaces, European planners are wary of architecture that functions as self-promotion making this a rare exception. Ever the opportunist, the restaurateur adopted the name of the French liner Normandie when it entered service in 1937. It can still be seen through the windows of the passing Kusttram between De Panne and Oostende where we photographed it on a wet day last September.