I have been fascinated by images of the road since I was a kid and would take pictures looking back out of the Mondeo on family holidays with my APS camera. And so it seems to fit that while studying at university I immersed myself in all the road photography i could find. Any image framed by the wing mirror or frame of a car window and i was hooked. In particular I was looking at
Jeff Brouws
Stephen Shore
Garry Winnogrand
Ed Ruscha
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Michael Eastman
Wim Wenders
Joel Sternfeld
The FSA
As with all things photography, the more you like, the more you look at the history of the images and of the subject. So below are a few of the books that have given me a much greater understanding of the road, the American dream (Life and death) and the architecture and towns that the road influenced.
'Learning from Las Vegas' by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour
Las Vegas is a great example of the 'Sprawl' - a town or city that has sprung up on the road out of necessity. When driving first became a popular persuit, people would drive just to drive but need places along the highway to stop, refuel, drink and eat. Las Vegas is much like a very very large and elaborate truck stop. In this book Venturi looks at how the road has influenced the architectural landscape of Las Vegas and how Las Vegas has influenced other roadside architecture.
Venturi touches on many topics with both color and black and white images to illustrate the architecture in question.
"We shall describe how we come by the automobile-oriented commercial architecture of urban sprawl as our source for a civic and residential architecture of meaning, viable now, as the turn-of-the-century industrial vocabulary was 40 years ago"
"Signs inflect towards the highway"
"Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary"
'Main Street to Miracle Mile' by Chester H Liebs
Liebs' 1985 book was the first to truly treat the roadside architecture of America as a subject to contemplate and to study. The book travels along a time-line of road architecture from curb-side gas pumps to roadside gas stations, diners, hotels and motels. Plenty of images to accompany Liebs' analysis and thoughts make this a great introduction/overview to roadside architecture.
"During the nineteenth century, a gradual, yet profound, revolution in travel was taking place, forever altering human understanding of time, distance and perception of landscape"
"Now, as the twentieth century creaks toward its final decade, the excitement of driving anywhere, anytime, has dimmed, and the automobile has assumed its place as an an accepted component in the daily routine"
'20th-Century Sprawl - Highways and Reshaping of the American Landscape' by Owen D. Gutfreund
Perhaps the 'driest' of books n this post but a great background on the birth of sprawl construction as well as planning and financial issues behind the introduction of national highways and byways.The book is full of real case studies of new road and housing developments across America.
'Mall Maker - victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream' by M Jeffrey Hardwick
An Austrian immigrant and the inventor of both the indoor shopping center and a key piece of popular American car culture. This is predominantly a biography telling the story of Gruen and how the malls that he pioneered came to be. An incredibly interesting look at just one aspect road related architecture.
"The shopping mall is both the most visible and the most contentious symbol of American prosperity"
"We are convinced that the real shopping center will be the most profitable type of chain store location yet developed, for the simple reason that it will include features to induce people to drive considerable distances to enjoy its vantages"
'The Geography of Nowhere - the Rise and Decline of America's Man-made Landscape' by James Howard-Kunstler
How the road and all that it came to influence has created a 'Geoography of Nowhere' among suburban America, an aesthetically bland and characterless landscape of roads, malls and gas stations. But this book also looks at the causes of these occurences and pays a lot of attention to the works of J.B Jackson and Robert Venturi to name a few. For those that have enjoyed work from Jeff Brouws, this is a must read.
"America. Ever-busy, ever-building, ever-in-motion, ever-throwing-out the old for the new..."
"Now that we have built the sprawling system of far-flung houses, offices, and discount marts connected by freeways, we can't afford to live in it"
Also of significant note is Jeff Brouws' essay 'Approaching Nowhere' in 'Approaching Nowhere'
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