Posted by: Nick Maggio

THE DEATH OF THE GAS STATION: ...

My dad recently took a trip to Italy, one my parents take a couple times a year…without me. Although jealous of their travels, one thing I can count on is random things brought back to me. Magazines, shirts, antiques, and especially books. Books written in Italian. My parents know me better than anybody else, so when they saw “L’auto Dipinta” resting on a shelf with an illustration of a vintage Fiat racecar on the cover, they bought it.

The book, from what I can tell, is an illustrated history of the first 50 or so years of FIAT. It’s pretty amazing. Through all the great photos and illustrations, one thing caught my eye, a series of architectural renderings of gas stations. Now, in a book highlighting some of the most beautiful racecars ever designed, it’s odd that my eye rests on gas stations, but let me explain.

These are not square buildings with a couple pumps outside. These are sleek, sexy works of art one could hang upside down in a gallery and sell as fine examples of neo-abstract impressionism to rich couples in New York. Their lines reminiscent more of a racecar than those of a stationary structure. Their rolling, smooth features look as if they were drawn not by an architect but were effortlessly gestured by a ballet dancer.



These were not just gas stations, they were beacons of hope. These little sketches acted as far more than someone’s idea for a refueling structure, they were someone’s idealistic vision of hope and a better tomorrow. I have often said that if I could have been born in any other year than 1980, it would have been 1947. That would put me at the perfect age to experience everything I love about American History. The most important of those eras, being the 50’s. I would be a child, a boy, wearing a bright red cowboy hat, listening to radio shows, and packing two six-shooters in my brown leather belt. I would play with my sleek, lead painted models of spaceships and go to the World’s Fair to see what the future would in fact look like. And the future, looked like the gas station drawings in my new book.



But what did I get instead? Being a child in the 80’s. One of the, if not THE worst time for not only gas station architecture, but maybe life in general.

Although these were drawn in the 30's and not the 50's, the idea was the same. These gas station drawings stand not just as a testament to a time when peopl e actually believed that the future held bright and beautiful things, but a barometer of our World’s level of hope. Now, pages in a book, they stand merely as an unfortunate and grim reminder that we as a people lost that belief and succumb to the mediocre idea that, this is just a gas station, and it will do… AS IS. Although these are simply gas stations, they break my heart. Because I know that they are so much more.



What does this teach us, teach me? That no matter how small and insignificant something may seem, when it comes to design, creation and building, one should do so with the responsibility that you are not just designing a shirt, a house or a motorcycle, you are building a moment, a commentary on the world’s state of hope and a piece of history that could one day be translated into Italian, put in a book and inspire a whole new generation.


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