The Winding Road of American Gas Station Design

This story is part of our annual look at the state of American design. This year, we’re highlighting work that shines through an acrimonious moment—and makes the case for optimism.

Welcome to Origin Story, a series that chronicles the lesser-known histories of designs that have shaped how we live.

Since the early 20th century, gas stations in the United States have gone from novel to ubiquitous roadside icons. Emblems of Americana, they reflect the country’s ever-evolving terrain, reminding us of the increased mobility brought on by car culture and the ensuing influence on the zeitgeist and transformed landscape of suburban sprawl. Over the years, service station architecture has mirrored the ebb and flow of design trends and provided a canvas for technological innovations. Here, we map major landmarks in the history of U.S. gas stations and ponder their journey’s next leg.

An Emblem Emerges

The first "filling stations" of the early 1900s had just the basics: curbside gasoline pumps installed outside local businesses. This led to shed-type "drive-in" structures with wood or metal canopies and a sheltered area for the service attendant. As cars became more integrated into American culture, they carved out more space in American neighborhoods too. To better blend into residential environments, gas stations of the early 1920s adopted popular period styles like colonial and Mission Revival or Tudor Revival and English cottage designs. In the 1930s, streamline moderne and International Style influences ushered in a new form: the box station. These utilitarian, easily standardized structures featured flat roofs, unadorned exteriors, large windows, and glazed service doors to showcase products and offerings.

Roadside Attractions

If drivers had to stop for fuel, companies began to posit, shouldn’t we make the experience memorable? While some service stations sought to blend into their settings, others were built to turn heads. During the 1920s and ’30s and continuing onward, mimetic (also called programmatic or novelty) architecture became an increasingly popular marketing tactic for oil companies. Gas stations assumed the shapes of animals, airplanes, teapots, windmills, and igloos, as well as Western wear. (Texaco’s 1954 Hat n’ Boots station in Seattle, pictured above, was so beloved that after it stopped operating in the ’80s, locals fought to have the sculptures relocated to a nearby park.) Shell built a number of stations in the shape of its scallop-shell logo; the sole remaining one in North Carolina is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Modernist Masters

As gas stations became an integral part of the modern built environment, many of the 20th century’s most distinguished architects tried their hand at designing them. Between the ’30s and ’60s, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Jean Prouvé, Arne Jacobsen, Albert Frey, and Eliot Noyes all fashioned forward-looking fueling stations across North America and Europe, some of which, like Frey’s Palm Springs station and Mies van der Rohe’s Montreal Esso outpost, have since been repurposed into civic buildings. Frank Lloyd Wright designed a gas station as part of his 1930s utopian vision for Broadacre City. Although his plan for the American exurban development was never realized, he was commissioned to bring a version of his gas station design to fruition in the 1950s. The R.W. Lindholm Service Station in Minnesota, made of Wright’s signature cement blocks, is still in operation.

Going Googie

Few cities are as synonymous with the gas station as Los Angeles. It’s also the birthplace of Googie, the space-age style of design that mixed curvilinear streamline moderne forms of the ’30s with the vernacular kitsch of the ’50s, representing societal fascinations of the time like car culture and futurism. Googie architecture was particularly popular with roadside attractions like diners, motels, and, of course, gas stations. The 1960s Union 76 station, designed by Gin Wong of William Pereira and Associates, is Googie at its finest: A huge, swooping canopy levitates like a UFO over the pumps, illuminated by a row of fluorescent bulbs that work like a Hollywood spotlight on the structure’s curves.

Electric Future

As car ownership patterns change and more consumers opt for hybrid and all-electric vehicles, the new frontier for futurist gas station architecture involves a major shift in both infrastructure and aesthetic. A 2021 global design competition for EV charging stations of the future, for example, resulted in plans for modular stations with solar-paneled canopies or green roofs instead of metal pumps. The most revolutionary thing about the electric charging station, though, might be that it dispenses with the traditional notion of a gas station altogether: There are, to date, nearly 200,000 vehicle charging ports in the U.S., and many of them are installed, discreetly, in existing parking lots.

Top photo of the R.W. Lindholm Service Station courtesy John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

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