Abstract
Bobby Troup’s iconic 1946 song Get your Kicks on Route 66 captured the spirit of mid-20th Century treks to the west coast made by millions of Americans along 2,500 miles of highway US 66, the ‘Mother Road’ seamlessly connecting Chicago to Los Angeles. Troup’s song with its easy melody and catchy words, became a radio standard encapsulating the allure of the new and trendy with the folklore of the restless cowboy. The resulting mid-century mobile culture brought pervasive highways and an interconnected network of super interstate throughfares. This birthed a spatial and social transformation – a new horizontally landscaped ‘space’ - fragmented, pragmatic, and uniform, but lacking a singular hierarchy or design identity. The result is a ‘roadside vernacular,’ with strip commercial architecture, highway by-passes and ‘big box’ stores and suburban shopping malls with expansive and environmentally destructive and socially segregating seas of free parking fully utilized for few weeks each year. Inspired by JB Jackson, Robert Venturi, Kevin Lynch, Gordon Cullen and others, this research reflects a decade of field investigations along American roads, driving 30,000 miles throughout the US, and collecting 25,000 images capturing natural and built contexts. This study dissects the design of America’s roadside vernacular landscapes and contextual environments. Using typological analysis of signage and building types, and the environmental context results in discovering the interconnected spatial and temporal interplay of the built and design vernacular. Our typographical research uncovers the speculative future for design approaches beyond formal styles and introduces inclusive design vocabularies for environmental designers.
Presenters
Henry HildebrandtProfessor, School of Architecture and Interior Design, University of Cincinnati, Ohio, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Architectonic, Spatial, and Environmental Design
KEYWORDS
ROAD SIGNAGE, COMMERCIAL VERNACULAR, POP CULTURE, HIGHWAY LANDSCAPES, BUILT ENVIRONMENTS
